• Accepted Paper

Double-quantum-enhanced coherent control and magnetic sensing of spin defects in hexagonal boron nitride

Shihao Ru, Abdullah Rasmita, Jiakai Chen, Yuzhe Yang, Xiaodan Lyu, Robert Cernansky, Edwin Hang Tong Teo, Jesús Zúñiga-Pérez, Fedor Jelezko, and Weibo Gao

Phys. Rev. Applied - Accepted 9 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/hmk5-d2dj

Abstract

The negatively charged boron vacancy (VB−) in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is a promising spin defect for quantum sensing in two-dimensional material systems. Previous hBN experiments have mainly exploited the two spin-triplet ground-state single-quantum transitions separately. Here we implement a double-quantum driving scheme based on simultaneous resonant microwave excitation of both ground-state single-quantum transitions, establishing coherent control of the Δms=2 manifold in a VB− ensemble. We compare the resulting double-quantum response with the corresponding single-quantum protocol under identical experimental conditions. The double-quantum protocol enhances the optical readout contrast and yields a 2.6-fold signal-to-noise improvement in AC magnetometry. We further use the double-quantum relaxation channel as a differential probe of electric-field and strain noise, showing that the present data are compatible with correlated-surface or volume-distributed fluctuations, while short-range uncorrelated surface-noise models are disfavored within the assumptions of our analysis. These results establish double-quantum coherent control and frequency-resolved AC magnetometry in hBN spin ensembles, and identify the sample-dependent measurements needed to determine the microscopic origin of the dominant relaxation channels.

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