CREST-PRF: Exploring the dynamics of strongly coupled spin-photon systems

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With support from the Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (PRF), this project aims at exploring strong light-matter interactions on well-known color centers in diamond by interfacing engineered diamond membranes with photonic cavities. These interactions bring further tunability to the overall optoelectronic properties of color centers, forming a hybridized half-light half-matter system with potential applications in the areas of neural networks and enhanced nanoscale sensing. The current efforts within the community have been directed towards strong coupling of individual color centers in solids, which is challenging in fundamental ways. Instead, this project aims at reaching strong light-matter coupling with dense color center ensembles to explore collective phenomena and emergent properties of these hybrid states. Such collective behavior is expected to enhance nanoscale sensing and provide a platform for next generation computation. The specific aims of the project are oriented towards reaching the so-called ‘strong-coupling regime’ with nitrogen-vacancy and silicon-divacancy color centers in diamond. In this regime, the light/matter components are not independent anymore, and collectively describe what would be a defect-excitation-cavity-photon hybrid state. In realizing such goal, it is important to assess the physical requirements for the diamond samples such as thickness and defect densities, as well as optimal photonic-cavity designs. To elucidate these details a priori, analytical, and numerical methods will be used to ‘inverse-design’ the hybrid diamond-cavity systems. Such designs could be based on light-matter coupling strengths that can be reliably measured in experiments, by Fourier-space imaging, and time-resolved spectroscopy methods. These approaches will help understand the photophysical dynamics of strongly coupled color centers, as well as assessing their potential tunability and integration via photonic interactions. The CREST PRF awards provide research experience and training for early career scientists at active CREST Centers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.