Suppression of coherent errors during entangling operations in NV centers in diamond

Abstract: We consider entangling operations in a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond where the hyperfine-coupled nuclear spin qubits are addressed with radio-frequency (rf) pulses conditioned on the state of the central electron spin. Limiting factors for the gate fidelity are coherent errors due to off-resonant driving of neighboring transitions in the dense, hyperfine-split energy spectrum of the defect and non-negligible perpendicular hyperfine tensor components that narrow the choice of $^{13}\rm C$ nuclear spin qubits. We address these issues by presenting protocols based on synchronization effects that allow for a complete suppression of both error sources in state-of-the-art CNOT gate schemes. This is possible by a suitable choice of parameter sets that incorporate the error into the scheme instead of avoiding it. These results contribute to the recent progress toward scalable quantum computation with defects in solids.