A home-made portable device based on Arduino Uno for pulsed magnetic resonance of NV centers in diamond

Abstract

We describe the realization of a homemade and portable setup to perform experiments of pulsed magnetic resonance of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamonds. The system is fully implemented by using an Arduino Uno board equipped with an AVR microcontroller that is used as a transistor-transistor logic pulse sequencer to drive precise laser and microwave pulses with a resolution of 62.5 ns. The equipment is assembled with low-cost modules on a printed circuit board and placed in a compact box with a volume of 20 × 40 × 10 cm3. The detection system is based on a switched integrator and a photodiode in the vicinity of a diamond substrate and read by oversampling the analog-to-digital converter of Arduino Uno. We characterize a CVD diamond sample by performing the pulsed optically detected magnetic resonance and we show the possibility to perform a coherent manipulation of the electron spin of NV centers by driving Rabi oscillations up to 6 MHz with microwave powers within 1 W. We demonstrate different pulse sequences to study electron spin relaxation and dephasing. Finally, we propose additional modules and an antenna to perform the multifrequency manipulation of the electron spin by microwave and radio-frequency pulses. Compared to the previous studies, our system results in a low-cost setup with significantly reduced complexity, which finds application as a learning module for science education and enables a wider audience to access the magnetic resonance in diamond.