Abstract

The Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) centre is a point defect consisting of a nitrogen-vacancy lattice pair embedded in diamond. The NV centre has two stable charge states, the neutral charge state and the (NV⁰) and the negatively charged state (NV⁻) with photo induced interconversion between these two states [1]. The NV centre is an intensively studied material that has shown a wide range of applications in both Physics and Biology due to its high stability and interesting optical properties. Applications ranging from imaging and tracking biological structures, to nanoscale sensing, to applications in highly controlled quantum experiments have all been realised using these centres [2,3]. However, these applications rely only on the NV⁻ charge stage and often neglect the effects of the neutral charge state. As a result the NV⁰ charge state has not received the same level of study as the NV⁻ state and the effects of the interconversion between the two states are poorly understood, even though it can have a significant effect on the emitted fluorescence.

© 2017 IEEE