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Charge-state dynamics during excitation and depletion of the nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond

MetadataDetails
Publication Date2018-06-13
JournalPhysical review. A/Physical review, A
AuthorsLuke Hacquebard, Lilian Childress
InstitutionsMcGill University
Citations57

The charge state dynamics of the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond play\na key role in a wide range of applications, yet remain imperfectly understood.\nUsing single ps-pulses and pulse pairs, we quantitatively investigate the\ncharge dynamics associated with excitation and fluorescence depletion of a\nsingle NV center. Our pulsed excitation approach permits significant modeling\nsimplifications, and allows us to extract relative rates of excitation,\nstimulated emission, ionization, and recombination under 531 nm and 766 nm\nillumination. By varying the duration between paired pulses, we can also\ninvestigate ionization and recombination out of metastable states. Our results\nare directly applicable to experiments employing stimulated emission-depletion\nimaging, and can be used to predict optimal operating regimes where excitation\nand stimulated emission are maximized relative to charge-state-switching\nprocesses.\n