Publications

Solid-state quantum sensors are attracting wide interest because of their sensitivity at room temperature. In particular, the spin properties of individual nitrogen-vacancy (NV) colour centres in diamond make them outstanding nanoscale sensors of magnetic fields, electric fields and temperature under ambient conditions. Recent work on NV ensemble-based magnetometers, inertial sensors, and clocks has employed unentangled colour centres to realize significant improvements in sensitivity. However, to achieve this potential sensitivity enhancement in practice, new techniques are required to excite efficiently and to collect the optical signal from large NV ensembles. Here, we introduce a light-trapping diamond waveguide geometry with an excitation efficiency and signal collection that enables in excess of 5% conversion efficiency of pump photons into optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) fluorescence--an improvement over previous single-pass geometries of more than three orders of magnitude. This marked enhancement of the ODMR signal enables precision broadband measurements of magnetic field and temperature in the low-frequency range, otherwise inaccessible by dynamical decoupling techniques.