Physical Review Applied ( IF 4.194 ) Pub Date :
Q. -Y. Cao, P. -C. Yang, M. -S. Gong, M. Yu, A. Retzker, M. B. Plenio, C. Müller, N. Tomek, B. Naydenov, L. P. McGuinness, F. Jelezko, and J. -M. Cai

Due to its superior coherent and optical properties at room temperature, the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has become a promising quantum probe for nanoscale quantum sensing. However, the application of NV containing nanodiamonds to quantum sensing suffers from their relatively poor spin coherence times. Here we demonstrate energy efficient protection of NV spin coherence in nanodiamonds using concatenated continuous dynamical decoupling, which exhibits excellent performance with less stringent microwave power requirement. When applied to nanodiamonds in living cells we are able to extend the spin coherence time by an order of magnitude to the ${T}_{1}$-limit of up to $30\mu$s. Further analysis demonstrates concomitant improvements of sensing performance which shows that our results provide an important step towards in vivo quantum sensing using NV centers in nanodiamond.

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