Room-temperature implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm with a single electronic spin in diamond

The nitrogen-vacancy defect center (NV center) is a promising candidate for quantum information processing due to the possibility of coherent manipulation of individual spins in the absence of the cryogenic requirement. We report a room-temperature implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm by encoding both a qubit and an auxiliary state in the electron spin of a single NV center. By thus exploiting the specific S=1 character of the spin system, we demonstrate how even scarce quantum resources can be used for test-bed experiments on the way towards a large-scale quantum computing architecture.