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Recently, rotation sensors utilizing the nuclear spins of nitrogen-vacancy color centers in diamond have been demonstrated. However, these devices are power-intensive and challenging to integrate into small chip-based radiofrequency antennas and circuits necessary for controlling nuclear spins or producing relatively high magnetic fields. To address this issue, the coherent manipulation of nuclear spins via coherent population trapping at moderate magnetic fields using microwave fields has been successfully demonstrated in isotopically pure diamond. In this work, we demonstrate that a similar technique can be applied to a diamond plate with a natural abundance of carbon-13, which holds significant potential for practical sensing applications. Although the forbidden resonances required for coherent control were only partially observed, coherent population trapping was successfully demonstrated at both visible and invisible transitions, with an apparent contrast of up to 98 +- 11% and a true contrast of approximately 35 +-7%. This finding confirms the feasibility of coherent nuclear spin control even in diamond plates with naturally occurring carbon-13.

Temperature sensors based on the GeV color center in diamond are gaining considerable attention in both scientific and industrial fields. For widespread industrial adoption, however, these sensors need a design that is as simple and cost-effective as possible. The original sensor design relied on measuring the spectral characteristics of the zero-phonon line. Recently, a modified approach was introduced, which involves splitting the GeV emission with a dichroic mirror and determining temperature based on the ratio of the two resulting signals. In this analysis, we provide a detailed comparison of both methods. At room temperature, the two methods show comparable performance, with slight variations depending on component quality. However, at temperatures around 300 {\deg}C, the new method's performance is estimated to be nearly twice that of the original, provided optimal filter parameters are used. Additionally, the sensitivity of the new method remains roughly consistent with its performance at room temperature.

Single NV centers in diamond coupled by hyperfine interaction to neighboring 13C nuclear spins are now widely used in the emerging quantum technologies as elements of quantum memory adjusted to NV center electron spin qubit. For nuclear spins with low flip-flop rate, single shot readout was demonstrated under ambient conditions. Here we report on the systematic search of such stable NV-13C systems using density functional theory (DFT) to simulate hyperfine and spatial characteristics of all possible NV-13C complexes in the H-terminated cluster C510 [NV]-H252 hosting the NV center. Along with the expected stable NV- axial 13C systems wherein the 13C nuclear spin is located on the NV axis, we found for the first time new families of positions for the 13C nuclear spin exhibiting negligible hyperfine-induced flipping rates due to near-symmetric local spin density distribution. Spatially, these positions are located in the diamond bilayer passing through the vacancy of the NV center and being perpendicular to the NV axis. Analysis of available publications showed that, apparently, some of the predicted non-axial near-stable systems NV-13C have already been observed experimentally. A special experiment done on one of these systems confirmed the prediction made

We have performed a statistical characterization of the effect of afterpulsing in a free-running silicon single-photon detector by measuring the distribution of afterpulse waiting times in response to pulsed illumination and fitting it by a sum of exponentials. We show that a high degree of goodness of fit can be obtained for 5 exponentials, but the physical meaning of estimated characteristic times is dubious. We show that a continuous limit of the sum of exponentials with a uniform density between the limiting times gives excellent fitting results in the full range of the detector response function. This means that in certain detectors the afterpulsing is caused by a continuous band of deep levels in the active area of the photodetector., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures

The stationary state of a single-atom (single-qubit) laser is shown to be a phase-averaged nonlinear coherent state - an eigenstate of a specific deformed annihilation operator. The solution found for the stationary state is unique and valid for all regimes of the single-qubit laser operation. We have found the parametrization of the deformed annihilation operator which provides superconvergence in finding the stationary state by iteration. It is also shown that, contrary to the case of the usual laser with constant Einstein coefficients describing transition probabilities, for the single-atom laser the interaction-induced transition probabilities effectively depend on the field intensity.

Entanglement represents an important resource for quantum information processing, but its generation itself requires physical resources that are limited. We propose a scheme for generating a wide class of entangled qudit-type states of optical field modes at sites separated by noisy medium when only weak optical nonlinearities are available at both sites. The protocol is also based on exploiting a weak probe field, transmitted between the sites and used for generation of quantum correlations between two spatially separated field modes. The idea of probabilistic entanglement enhancement by measurement is discussed, and corresponding scheme for measuring the probe field state with linear optics and photodetectors not resolving photon numbers is proposed. It is shown that the protocol is applicable in the case when decoherence, limited efficiency and dark counts of photodetectors, and uncertainty of nonlinear coupling constants are present.

We perform a comparison of two protocols for generating a cryptographic key composed from d-valued symbols: one exploiting a string of independent qubits and another one utilizing d-level systems prepared in states belonging to d+1 mutually unbiased bases. We show that the protocol based on qubits is optimal for quantum cryptography, since it provides higher security and higher key generation rate., Comment: Revtex, 4 pages, 1 eps figure

We propose a new scheme and protocol for quantum teleportation of a single-mode field state, based on entanglement produced by quantum non-demolition interaction. We show that the recently attained results in QND technique allow to perform the teleportation in quantum regime. We also show that applying QND coupling to squeezed fields will significantly improve the quality of teleportation for a given degree of squeezing., Comment: 4 pages RevTeX, 2 figures