Nuclear spin pair coherence in diamond for atomic scale magnetometry

The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre, as a promising candidate solid state system of quantum information processing, its electron spin coherence is influenced by the magnetic field fluctuations due to the local environment. In pure diamonds, the environment consists of hundreds of C-13 nuclear spins randomly spreading in several nanometers range forming a spin bath. Controlling and prolonging the electron spin coherence under the influence of spin bath are challenging tasks for the quantum information processing. On the other hand, for a given bath distribution, many of its characters are encoded in the electron spin coherence. So it is natural to ask the question: is it possible to 'decode' the electron spin coherence, and extract the information about the bath structures? Here we show that, among hundreds of C-13 bath spins, there exist strong coupling clusters, which give rise to the millisecond oscillations of the electron spin coherence. By analyzing these oscillation features, the key properties of the coherent nuclear spin clusters, such as positions, orientations, and coupling strengths, could be uniquely identified. This addressability of the few-nuclear-spin cluster extends the feasibility of using the nuclear spins in diamond as qubits in quantum computing. Furthermore, it provides a novel prototype of single-electron spin based, high-resolution and ultra-sensitive detector for the chemical and biological applications.