Portable Nitrogen-Vacancy Center-Based Quantum Demonstrator

The quantum revolution is here and making quantum technology accessible to a wider audience is the need of the hour. This work is a step towards building a portable quantum demonstrator so that end users can run their own quantum experiments. To achieve this, we leverage the Quantum Engineering Toolkit from Keysight to control a Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) center-based quantum magnetometer from SBQuantum.

Ensemble NVs are an ideal platform for such demonstrations as they can be coherently controlled at room temperature irrespective of the surrounding environmental conditions. This platform was used to perform basic quantum experiments, and it can also be used to carry out custom experiments by designing DIY pulse sequences and for learning the basics of quantum sensing. We can characterize the device by performing Allan Deviation and Randomized Benchmarking to determine the sources of noise/errors and formulate mitigation/correction strategies. Quantum technologies are moving into a highly applied science domain for which it needs skilled people. University education teaches theoretical skills, but nothing can replace the learning received from a more hands-on experience of manipulating a quantum system and this demonstrator promises to do just that.

*This work was supported in part by the NRC of Canada Quantum Sensors Challenge Program.