Towards coherent charge transport between individual nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond as a platform for quantum information processing

Color centers in wide bandgap semiconductors emerged as one of the major material platforms for quantum information science, quantum computing and sensing, with nitrogen vacancy center (NV) in diamond being one of the most promising qubit candidates. While the nanoscale quantum registers with 10 qubits and the long-distance entanglement between 3 NV nodes have been demonstrated, scaling to a larger number of qubits remains an outstanding challenge. Here, we discuss the possibility of using photoionized charge carriers for quantum information transfer between NV qubits. Following our recent observation of a giant hole capture cross section by an NV^- center, we further explore the ways to increase the fidelity of the transport process in order to approach the regime of a single carrier capture detection with a possibility to then probe its spin. We experimentally demonstrate the effect of the externally applied electric fields on the hole capture probability by the NV^- and its temperature dependence. We also develop a semiclassical Monte Carlo model that successfully describes the details of carrier propagation and capture by the trap under the conditions used in the experiment. A more detailed description of a hole capture through a series of weakly bound excitonic levels within the Coulombic potential at the site of NV^- is developed through solving the effective mass equations with the input from the first-principles calculations.