Engineering of Fermi level by nin diamond junction for control of charge states of NV centers

Abstract

The charge-state control of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond is very important toward its applications because the NV centers undergo stochastic charge-state transitions between the negative charge state (NV À ) and the neutral charge state (NV 0 ) of the NV center upon illumination. In this letter, engineering of the Fermi level by a nin diamond junction was demonstrated for the control of the charge state of the NV centers in the intrinsic (i) layer region. By changing the size (d) of the i-layer region between the phosphorus-doped n-type layer regions (nin) from 2 lm to 10 lm, we realized the gradual change in the NV À charge-state population in the i-layer region from 60% to 80% under 532 nm excitation, which can be attributed to the band bending in the i-layer region. Also, we quantitatively simulated the changes in the Fermi level in the i-layer region depending on d with various concentrations of impurities in the i-layer region.

Sensitivity optimization for NV-diamond magnetometry

“…Based on the work of Groot-Berning et al (2014), surface termination should provide enhanced charge-state stability to a depth of at least 60 nm, and possibly farther (Malinauskas et al, 2008;Santori et al, 2009). The chargestate efficiency ζ can also be controlled electrically (Grotz et al, 2012;Kato et al, 2013;Hauf et al, 2014;Schreyvogel et al, 2014Schreyvogel et al, , 2015Karaveli et al, 2016;Forneris et al, 2017;Murai et al, 2018). Because diamond is an approximately 5.47 eV wide band gap insulator (Wort and Balmer, 2008), Collins (2002) contends that an NV center's charge-state depends less on the position of the Fermi level and more on the distance to the nearest charge donor.…”

“…Introduction of electron donors other than nitrogen into diamond might appear to be a promising avenue for increasing the NV charge-state efficiency. For example, phosphorus (Groot-Berning et al, 2014;Doi et al, 2016;Murai et al, 2018), with a donor level 0.6 eV below the conduction band (Katagiri et al, 2004), is a shallower donor than nitrogen, which lies 1.7 eV below the conduction band (Farrer, 1969;Wort and Balmer, 2008). However, creating n-doped diamond through the introduction of phosphorus has proven difficult (Kalish, 1999), as phosphorus doping is correlated with the introduction of a deep acceptor tentatively identified as the phosphorus vacancy (PV) (Jones, Lowther, and Goss, 1996).…”

“…(Schwander and Partes, 2011) and if the hydrogen etching and carbon deposition rates are carefully tuned, diamond synthesis can be achieved (Angus, Will, and Stanko, 1968). Unlike HPHT synthesis, PE-CVD (alternatively simply called CVD) synthesis can easily allow the production of thin or deltadoped layers from nanometer to micron scale (Ohno et al, 2012;McLellan et al, 2016), masked synthesis of diamond structures (Zhang and Hu, 2016), or layered epitaxial growth required for p-i-n (Kato et al, 2013) or n-i-n structures, the latter of which consists of an intrinsic region sandwiched between two n-doped regions (Murai et al, 2018).…”

Selective measurement of charge dynamics in an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy centers in nanodiamond and bulk diamond

“…In spite of the detrimental impact of charge state instability on spin polarization [13,17], and consequently on the sensing capabilities of NV centers, a clear understanding of charge dynamics of NV ensembles is lacking. * rakshyakar.giri@iit.it Attempts to control the charge states of NVs by manipulating the Fermi level are reported in the literature [11,[18][19][20][21][22]. It was demonstrated that an ensemble of NV centers could be stable enough to be used as a charge based data storage medium [23,24].…”

Chemical vapour deposition diamond single crystals with nitrogen-vacancy centres: a review of material synthesis and technology for quantum sensing applications

“…Groot-Berning et al have clearly shown the effect of co-doping in implanted diamond films [170] as illustrated in figure 7(b). Fermi level tuning can also be achieved with insitu doped CVD diamond films [171] allowing a fine control over NV's charge state. Intentional doping of diamond by phosphorous during CVD growth is however particularly challenging due to the low doping efficiency of this element into the diamond while n-type conductivity is limited by compensating defects and high activation energy (0.6 eV) [172].…”