The so-called nitrogen vacancy (NV) centre in nanodiamond could be ideal for use in a host of future quantum technologies, including quantum computing and nanoscale sensing. However, most nanodiamonds available today contain a high density of paramagnetic impurities that make the electron spins in NV centres extremely fragile – they cannot hold their spin direction for very long (microseconds at most), which means that they are unable to store quantum information for any practical length of time. A team of researchers in the US is now reporting on record spin coherence times of more than 200 µs in NVs in highly pure nanodiamond fabricated using a new mask and ion etching process – a feat that could allow for real-world applications using these defects…….
http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/55603
