Applied Physics/Physics Colloquium: Ania Bleszynski Jayich – “New Directions in Quantum Sensing with Solid- State Qubits”

The diamond nitrogen vacancy (NV) center spin qubit is a uniquely versatile quantum sensor that offers a path towards truly nanoscale magnetic imaging with high sensitivity over a wide range of temperatures and applications targets. Here I discuss NV-based scanned magnetic imaging experiments as applied to condensed matter systems, in particular focusing on a new sensing modality for probing dynamics. These experiment, as well as all others to date, have primarily leveraged either single NV centers or ensembles of non-interacting NV centers. In the second part of the talk, I discuss the challenges, prospects, and experimental progress towards leveraging strongly-interacting spin ensembles for entanglement-enhanced quantum sensing.
Ania Bleszynski Jayich received her PhD in physics from Harvard in 2006 and her B.S. in physics and mathematical and computational science from Stanford in 2000. Under the supervision of Prof. Bob Westervelt, her thesis focused on scanned probe imaging of electron flow in semiconductor nanostructures. As a postdoc in Prof. Jack Harris’s group at Yale, she worked on magnetization measurements of condensed matter systems using ultrasensitive micromechanical detectors. Before joining UCSB as an assistant professor in 2010, she worked on coupling nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to nanomechanical resonators, in a project co-supervised by Profs. Misha Lukin at Harvard and Jack Harris.