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Synchronous manipulation of nuclear spins via boron-vacancy centers in hexagonal boron nitride

Fattah Sakuldee* and Mehdi Abdi†

  • *Contact author: fattah.sakuldee@sjtu.edu.cn
  • †Contact author: mehabdi@gmail.com
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Phys. Rev. Applied 24, 024036 – Published 14 August, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/vlqs-h75g

Abstract

We develop a method for entangling operations on nuclear spins surrounding a negatively charged boron-vacancy (VB-center) point defect in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). To this end, we propose to employ the electron spin of a VB center as a control qubit. We show that, in the presence of a background magnetic field and by applying control pulses, one can collectively manipulate the state of the nuclei with U^z and U^x rotations. These rotations can serve for implementing the synchronous three-qubit X, Z, and Hadamard gates. Through our numerical analyses considering realistic system parameters and decoherence effects, we demonstrate that these gates can be executed with high fidelities. Furthermore, as an example for the application of our toolbox, we use these collective gates to prepare the highly entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states among the three nuclear spins with a fidelity of 0.99. By including electron decoherence effects, we find that the relative deviations of the gate fidelities from the noisy terms are negligibly small, demonstrating the noise resilience of our protocols. Our work can serve as the foundation for exploiting the nuclear spins in hBN in future quantum technological applications.

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Phys. Rev. Applied 24, 024036– Published 14 August, 2025
  • Received 5 November 2024
  • Revised 23 April 2025
  • Accepted 15 May 2025
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