Solid-state electronic spin coherence time approaching one second

Solid-state spin systems such as nitrogen-vacancy colour centres in diamond are promising for applications of quantum information, sensing and metrology. However, a key challenge for such solid-state systems is to realize a spin coherence time that is much longer than the time for quantum spin manipulation protocols. Here we demonstrate an improvement of more than two orders of magnitude in the spin coherence time (T2) of nitrogen-vacancy centres compared with previous measurements: T2≈0.6 s at 77 K. We employed dynamical decoupling pulse sequences to suppress nitrogen-vacancy spin decoherence, and found that T2 is limited to approximately half of the longitudinal spin relaxation time over a wide range of temperatures, which we attribute to phonon-induced decoherence. Our results apply to ensembles of nitrogen-vacancy spins, and thus could advance quantum sensing, enable squeezing and many-body entanglement, and open a path to simulating driven, interaction-dominated quantum many-body Hamiltonians. Nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond are a promising route for solid-state quantum information processing and magnetometry, but longer coherence times are needed to optimize protocols. Here, Bar-Gill et al. suppress decoherence to realize nitrogen-vacancy spin coherence times approaching one second.