The negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond is an attractive candidate for applications that range from magnetometry to quantum information processing. In a paper published in Physical Review B we show that only a fraction of the nitrogen (typically <0.5%) incorporated during homoepitaxial diamond growth by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) is in the form of undecorated nitrogen-vacancy centre. Furthermore, studies on CVD diamond grown on (110)-oriented substrates show a near 100% preferential orientation of nitrogen-vacancy centres along only the two <111> directions pointing out of the growth plane. The results indicate that nitrogen-vacancy centres grow in as units, as the diamond is deposited, rather than by migration and association of their components. Reducing the number of NV orientations from four orientations to two orientations should lead to increased optically detected magnetic resonance contrast and thus improved magnetic sensitivity in ensemble-based magnetometry.

PHYSICAL REVIEW B Volume: 86 Issue: 3 Article Number: 035201 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.86.035201