Investigating the initialization and readout of relative populations of NV⁻ and NV⁰ defects in diamond

Tuning the electronic chemical potential through doping of semiconductors led to the development of the transistor and ultimately the electronic and optoelectronic revolutions¹. In many solid-state calculations, however, the electronic chemical potential was assumed to be effectively instantaneously uniform throughout a sample and this uniform value of the electronic chemical potential (also known as the Fermi level in the limit of zero temperature) would be solved for after the imposition of charge conservation. We show that for wide-bandgap semiconductors, the electronic chemical potential requires an appreciably finite amount of time to attain equilibrium throughout a given sample and leverage that finding to generalize donor–acceptor pairs (DAPs) in wide-bandgap semiconductors as a quantum science platform² to arbitrary dopant populations³.

¹ A. Zunger and O. I. Malyi, Chemical reviews 121, 3031 (2021).

² A. Bilgin, I. N. Hammock, J. Estes, Y. Jin, H. Bernien, A. A. High, and G. Galli, npj Comput. Mater. 10, 7 (2024).

³ R. Kuate Defo and S. L. Richardson, J. Appl. Phys. 135, 245702 (2024).