Pulse-width-induced polarization enhancement of optically pumped N-V electron spin in diamond

The nitrogen-vacancy(N-V) center in diamond is a widely used platform for quantum information processing and sensing. The electron-spin state of the N-V center could be initialized, read out optically, and manipulated by resonate microwave fields. In this work, we analyze the dependence of electron-spin initialization on widths of laser pulses. We build a numerical model to simulate this process and to verify the simulation results in experiments. Both simulations and experiments reveal that shorter laser pulses are helpful to the electron-spin polarization. We therefore propose to use extremely short laser pulses for electron-spin initialization. In this new scheme, the spin-state contrast could be improved about 10% in experiments by using laser pulses as short as 4 ns in width. Furthermore, we provide a mechanism to explain this effect, which is due to the occupation time in the meta-stable spin-singlet states of the N-V center. Our new scheme is applicable in a broad range of N-V-based applications in the future.