Decoupling Nuclear Spins via Interaction-Induced Freezing in Nitrogen Vacancy Centers in Diamond

Abstract: Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centers in diamonds provide a room-temperature platform for various emerging quantum technologies, e.g. the long nuclear spin coherence times as potential quantum memory registers. We demonstrate a freezing protocol for an NV center to isolate its intrinsic nuclear spin from a noisy electromagnetic environment. Any initial state of the nuclear spin can be frozen when the hyperfine-coupled electron and nuclear spins are simultaneously driven with unequal Rabi frequencies. Through numerical simulations, we show that our protocol can effectively shield the nuclear spin from strong drive or noise fields. We also observe a clear suppression of quantum correlations in the frozen nuclear spin regime by measuring the quantum discord of the electron-nuclear spin system. These features can be instrumental in extending the storage times of NV nuclear-spin based quantum memories in hybrid quantum systems.