Phonon cooling and lasing with nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond

Abstract

We investigate the strain-induced coupling between a nitrogen-vacancy impurity and a resonant vibrational mode of a diamond nanoresonator. We show that under near-resonant laser excitation of the electronic states of the impurity, this coupling can modify the state of the resonator and either cool the resonator close to the vibrational ground state or drive it into a large-amplitude coherent state. We derive a semiclassical model to describe both effects and evaluate the stationary state of the resonator mode under various driving conditions. In particular, we find that by exploiting resonant single- and multiphonon transitions between near-degenerate electronic states, the coupling to high-frequency vibrational modes can be significantly enhanced and dominate over the intrinsic mechanical dissipation. Our results show that a single nitrogen-vacancy impurity can provide a versatile tool to manipulate and probe individual phonon modes in nanoscale diamond structures.