Environment-assisted quantum-enhanced sensing with electronic spins in diamond

Abstract: The performance of solid-state quantum sensors based on electronic spin defects is often limited by the presence of environmental spin impurities that cause decoherence. A promising approach to improve these quantum sensors is to convert environment spins into useful resources for sensing. Here we demonstrate the efficient use of an unknown electronic spin defect in the proximity of a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond as both a quantum sensor and a quantum memory. We first experimentally evaluate the improvement in magnetic field sensing provided by mixed entangled states of the two electronic spins. Our results critically highlight the tradeoff between the advantages expected from increasing the number of spin sensors and the typical challenges associated with increasing control errors, decoherence rates, and time overheads. Still, by taking advantage of the spin defect as both a quantum sensor and a quantum memory whose state can be repetitively measured to improve the readout fidelity, we can achieve a gain in performance over the use of a single-spin sensor. These results show that the efficient use of available quantum resources can enhance quantum devices, pointing to a practical strategy towards quantum-enhanced sensing and information processing by exploiting environment spin defects.