Voltage driven, local, and efficient excitation of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond

Magnetic sensing technology has found widespread application in industries as diverse as transportation, medicine, and resource exploration. Such use cases often require highly sensitive instruments to measure the extremely small magnetic fields involved, relying on difficult to integrate Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) and Spin-Exchange Relaxation Free (SERF) magnetometers. A potential alternative, nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, has shown great potential as a high sensitivity and high resolution magnetic sensor capable of operating in an unshielded, room-temperature environment. Transitioning NV center based sensors into practical devices, however, is impeded by the need for high power RF excitation to manipulate them. Here we report an advance that combines two different physical phenomena to enable a highly efficient excitation of the NV centers: magnetoelastic drive of ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) and NV-magnon coupling. Our work demonstrates a new pathway to combine acoustics and magnonics that enables highly energy efficient and local excitation of NV centers without the need for any external RF excitation, and thus could lead to completely integrated, on-chip, atomic sensors.