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The use of color centers in diamond that are suitable as single photon emitters is currently at the forefront of efforts to establish crucial building blocks for a number of quantum technologies. Besides the well-known and widely investigated nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center, other single-photon emitting color centers with appealing properties have emerged in the last decade, including group-IV impurities and other impurity-related defects. In particular, the magnesium-vacancy (MgV) defect has been recently predicted to host a large, tunable, spin-dependent ground state splitting, making it particularly attractive for quantum information processing purposes [1].
In this contribution, we report on a comprehensive experimental investigation [2] of the MgV color center in diamond: detailed characterization of the structural properties and defect-formation efficiency, using $^{27}$Mg($t_{1/2}$ = 9.45 min) emission channeling at the EC-SLI setup at ISOLDE (IS668); in-depth study of the optical emission properties using photoluminescence (PL), at the ensemble and single-photon emitter levels. The emission channeling study reveals a very efficient formation of the MgV defect, i.e. a high fraction of implanted Mg (30-42%) in the split-vacancy configuration, attributed to the relevant optically-active center [1], comparable to what we have recently reported for the SnV defect also based on emission channeling at ISOLDE [3]. The PL results reveal a remarkably high emission rate, larger than that of the brightest group-IV impurity related defects (SnV, PbV). These experimental results, combined with the predicted spin-dependent properties [1], show the tremendous potential of the MgV center in the context of quantum sensing and quantum information processing applications.
[1] A. Pershin,(...), A. Gali, Highly tunable magneto-optical response from magnesium-vacancy color centers in diamond. npj Quantum Inf. 7, 99 (2021).
[2] E. Corte, G. Andrini, (…), U. Wahl, J. Forneris, Magnesium-vacancy optical centers in diamond, arXiv:2206.08670, 2022, submitted to ACS Photonics.
[3] U. Wahl, (...), L.M.C. Pereira, Direct Structural Identification and Quantification of the Split-Vacancy Configuration for Implanted Sn in Diamond, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 045301 (2020).
