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Updated: May 18, 2026

High Resolution Phonon-assisted Quasi-resonance Fluorescence Spectroscopy
Published on: June 28, 2016
Dynamic stabilization of the optical resonances of single nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond
V M Acosta1, C Santori, A Faraon
1Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304, USA. victor.acosta@hp.com
Abstract:
We report electrical tuning by the Stark effect of the excited-state structure of single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers located ≲100 nm from the diamond surface. The zero-phonon line (ZPL) emission frequency is controllably varied over a range of 300 GHz. Using high-resolution emission spectroscopy, we observe electrical tuning of the strengths of both cycling and spin-altering transitions. Under resonant excitation, we apply dynamic feedback to stabilize the ZPL frequency. The transition is locked over several minutes and drifts of the peak position on timescales ≳100 ms are reduced to a fraction of the single-scan linewidth, with standard deviation as low as 16 MHz (obtained for an NV in bulk, ultrapure diamond). These techniques should improve the entanglement success probability in quantum communications protocols.
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