Huan Zhao
Oak Ridge National Laboratory – Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA
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Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond have long served as robust quantum sensors, capable of optically detecting magnetic fields at room temperature. Recently, boron vacancy centers in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) have emerged as next-generation room-temperature quantum sensors, offering an out-of-plane quantization axis that is naturally aligned perpendicular to the 2D surface. However, the interactions between NV spins and boron vacancy spins—both electronic and nuclear—remain largely unexplored.
In this talk, I will present how the dynamics of NV centers are influenced by boron vacancy spins and how these interactions can be engineered using microwave fields. We create boron vacancies in hBN via deterministic helium implantation and then map their electron and nuclear spin transitions onto the NV spin transitions. This demonstration opens the door to using one quantum sensor to study another, which is especially beneficial for sensors emitting in the infrared regime, where photon detection is notoriously challenging.
Email: zhaoh1@ornl.gov