Shimon Kolkowitz: Scaling up quantum sensors based on nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond

Date: Wednesday, October 8th, 2025

Location: Elings Hall, room 1601

Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm

Scaling up quantum sensors based on nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond

Abstract: The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has been widely adopted as a quantum sensor, and is now even used in undergraduate instructional labs as a model quantum system. However, despite its ubiquity and popularity, most work has been restricted to measurements of one NV center at a time, or to globally averaged measurements of ensembles of many NV centers. In this talk, I will present an experimental demonstration of nanoscale covariance magnetometry, a technique for measuring spatiotemporal magnetic field correlations with pairs of NV centers, including the ability to distinguish between global and local noise sources, and the capability to measure signals of interest using free precession times beyond the apparent single NV coherence time in certain regimes. I will also present on recent results in which we have demonstrated the use of entangled pairs of NV centers to significantly reduce the overhead associated with covariance magnetometry. Finally, I will then present a new experimental platform we have developed for simultaneously manipulating and independently measuring hundreds of single NV centers, and thousands of pairwise spin-spin correlators, in parallel.

Bio: Shimon Kolkowitz is an experimental atomic physicist and quantum scientist, with his research focusing on precision measurement, quantum sensing, and metrology. He graduated with distinction from Stanford University in 2008 with a B.S. in Physics. He earned his PhD in experimental physics at Harvard in 2015, where his research focused on quantum sensing with defects in diamond. He was subsequently a National Research Council (NRC) postdoctoral fellow at JILA/NIST/CU Boulder from 2015-2017, working on metrology and
quantum science with optical lattice atomic clocks. From 2018 to 2023 he held a faculty position in the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2023, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Physics and holder of the Herst Chair. He is currently a Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator (2024), and is the recipient of the Packard Science and Engineering Fellowship (2019), the Sloan Research Fellowship (2022), and the National Science Foundation CAREER award.