Band-gap-engineered spin-phonon, and spin-spin interactions with defect centers in diamond coupled to phononic crystals

We study a spin-phononic system where diamond defect centers are interfaced with a quasi-one-dimensional phononic crystal. We show that, a single defect center, coupled to the phonon modes of a phononic crystal waveguide near the band gap, can seed its own phononic cavity mode with an exponentially decaying envelope around the defect center's position. The spin-induced phononic cavity, with a greatly reduced and tunable mode volume, allows coherent phonon-mediated interactions between distant spins with a highly tunable range, enabling access to a variety of long-range interacting spin models. This work opens prospects for exploring quantum many-body physics and quantum information processing with defect centers and periodic phononic nanostructures.