Dartmouth Events

Abstract: The semiconductor device components in our pockets are rapidly approaching the atomic scale, reflecting our astounding ability to construct almost anything we wish from the materials of our choice.  For years, physicists and engineers have dreamed of leveraging that ability to build machines that exploit the strange laws of quantum mechanics, where information exists in an indeterminate state prior to measurement and has a capacity that scales exponentially with the number of quantum components.  Counterintuitively, atom-scale defects in semiconductors might be the key to this ambitious engineering challenge. They exhibit many of the quantum features formerly unique to isolated atoms, but in room temperature devices amenable to integration via semiconductor nanofabrication.  In particular, the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has emerged as a promising single-spin system for wide-ranging applications in quantum computing, quantum communication, and nanoscale sensing for physics, chemistry and biology.  I will review the current state of this field and describe some of the techniques we have recently developed to control impurity spins like the diamond NV with light – protocols which provide a coherent interface between spins and photons and which can be used to address other defect spin systems with desirable properties for future applications.