Understanding the capture of charge carriers by colour centres in semiconductors is important for the development of novel forms of sensing and quantum information processing, but experiments typically involve ensemble measurements, often impacted by defect proximity. Here we show that confocal fluorescence microscopy and magnetic resonance can be used to induce and probe charge transport between individual nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond at room temperature. In our experiments, a ‘source’ nitrogen vacancy undergoes optically driven cycles of ionization and recombination to produce a stream of photogenerated carriers, one of which is subsequently captured by a ‘target’ nitrogen vacancy several micrometres away. We use a spin-to-charge conversion scheme to encode the spin state of the source colour centre into the charge state of the target, which allows us to set an upper bound to carrier injection from other background defects. We attribute our observations to the action of unscreened Coulomb potentials producing giant carrier capture cross-sections, orders of magnitude greater than those measured in ensembles.

了解半导体中色心对电荷载流子的捕获对于开发新形式的传感和量子信息处理非常重要，但实验通常涉及整体测量，通常会受到缺陷接近度的影响。在这里，我们展示了共聚焦荧光显微镜和磁共振可用于在室温下诱导和探测金刚石中各个氮空位中心之间的电荷传输。在我们的实验中，“源”氮空位经历了光驱动的电离和复合循环，以产生光生载流子流，其中一个随后被几微米外的“目标”氮空位捕获。我们使用自旋电荷转换方案将源色心的自旋状态编码为目标的电荷状态，这允许我们为其他背景缺陷的载流子注入设置上限。我们将我们的观察归因于产生巨大载流子捕获横截面的未经筛选的库仑势的作用，其数量级大于在集合中测量的数量级。