Bio

Hannah earned her BE (cum laude) in electrical engineering from Cooper Union in 2011. She was a NASA MUST scholar and spent four summers working in the nanotechnology division at NASA Ames Research Center on the Microcolumn Scanning Electron Microscope (MSEMS) project and led a microgravity flight experiment. She finished her masters degree at Columbia University in 2013. She is a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow and spent a summer as a visiting technologist in the Quantum Sciences and Technology group at JPL. She is currently a PhD candidate at MIT, splitting her time between Dirk Englund’s lab on campus and Danielle Braje’s lab in group 89 at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Her current research focuses on precision sensing and timekeeping based on large ensembles of NV centers in diamond.

Sensing and Timekeeping using a Light-Trapping Diamond Waveguide

Sensing and Timekeeping using a Light-Trapping Diamond Waveguide

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) color centers 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 color centers 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. We also use this device architecture to explore other precision sensing and timekeeping applications.