Photonic crystal defect cavities coupled to N-V centres in diamond

Abstract

We use focused ion beam (FIB) etching to create suspended photonic crystal cavities in diamond. Our goal is to enhance and control the spontaneous emission of single N-V colour centres, which act like single ‘two-level atoms’ emitting single photons. The single nitrogen-vacancy (N-V) colour centre in diamond has attracted a lot of interest because it can be optically addressed, is photostable at room temperature and has a paramagnetic ground state whose spin can be initialized and read-out optically. By enclosing the (N-V) colour centre in a resonant cavity we aim to develop rapid readout of this optically addressable single spin. We show a technique using FIB and confocal microscopy to locate single N-V centres and discuss progress towards etching cavities around single centres.