Direct formation of nitrogen-vacancy centers in nitrogen doped diamond along the trajectories of swift heavy ions
Funding Information: The work at LBL was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy, and Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) funding from Berkeley Lab, provided by the Director, Office of Science, of the U.S. Department of Energy; and the work at the Molecular Foundry was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The ion irradiation at GSI is based on a UMAT experiment, which was performed at the M-branch of the UNILAC at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum fu€r Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt (Germany) in the frame of FAIR Phase-0. R.E.L. acknowledges support from the Academy of Finland under Grant No. 265675 and the Aalto University Centre for Quantum Engineering. M.T. acknowledges funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 730871. This work was also supported by the coordinated research project "F11020" of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Publisher Copyright: © 2021 U.S. Government. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved. ; We report depth-resolved photoluminescence measurements of nitrogen-vacancy (NV-) centers formed along the tracks of swift heavy ions (SHIs) in type Ib synthetic single crystal diamonds that had been doped with 100 ppm nitrogen during crystal growth. Analysis of the spectra shows that NV- centers are formed preferentially within regions where electronic stopping processes dominate and not at the end of the ion range where elastic collisions lead to the formation of vacancies and defects. Thermal annealing further increases NV yields after irradiation with SHIs preferentially in regions with high vacancy densities. NV centers formed along the tracks of single swift heavy ions can be isolated with lift-out techniques for explorations of color center qubits in quasi-1D registers with an average qubit spacing of a few nanometers and of ...