Optics and Photonics July 6, 2018 An international team of researchers (USA – Princeton University, Gemological Institute of America, UK) reports a color center that shows insensitivity to environmental decoherence caused by phonons and electric field noise: the neutral charge state of silicon vacancy (SiV0). Through careful materials engineering, they achieved >80% conversion of implanted silicon to SiV0. SiV0 exhibits spin-lattice relaxation times approaching 1 minute and coherence times approaching 1 second. Its optical properties are very favorable, with ~90% of its emission into the zero-phonon line and near–transform-limited optical linewidths. These combined properties make SiV0 a promising defect for […]