Quantum Defects in Diamond: Identifying Nitrogen Isotopes of Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers are point defects in diamond formed by one substitutional nitrogen atom and an adjacent vacancy. Low spectral diffusion is a necessary property for NV centers to be qubit candidates. To characterize differences between naturally formed and ion implanted NV centers, diamond samples were studied that contained both types. The ion implantation process used 15N to be able to differentiate from the 14N naturally formed NV centers. This project focused on identifying the isotope of a single NV center, which is the first step toward understanding differences in their emissive properties. Code was developed to execute, and then automate, the three experiments necessary to identify the isotope of a single NV center: Continuous Wave Optically Detected Magnetic Resonance (CW ODMR), Rabi oscillations, and Pulsed ODMR. The code was implemented on a test sample, where it successfully identified the isotope of several NV centers. The next step in this project is to link the isotope of NV centers to their emissive properties, with a goal of producing reliable qubits for quantum information processing circuits