A novel demodulation method for transmission using nitrogen–vacancy-based solid-state quantum sensor

Abstract

Diamond based quantum sensing is a fast-emerging field with both scientific and technological significance. The nitrogen–vacancy (NV) center, a crystal defect in diamond, has become a unique object for microwave sensing applications due to its excellent stability, long spin coherence time, and optical properties at ambient condition. In this work, we use diamond NV center as atomic receiver to demodulate on–off keying (OOK) signal transmitted in broad frequency range (2 GHz–14 GHz in a portable benchtop setup). We proposed a unique algorithm of voltage discrimination and demonstrated audio signal transceiving with fidelity above 99%. This diamond receiver is attached to the end of a tapered fiber, having all optic nature, which will find important applications in data transmission tasks under extreme conditions such as strong electromagnetic interference, high temperatures, and high corrosion.