Cavity-Enhanced Emission and Absorption of Color Centers in a Diamond Membrane With Selectable Strain

Group IV color centers in diamond are among the most promising optically active spin systems with strong optical transitions and long spin coherences. The ground-state splitting of the center is particularly important to suppress the interaction with coherence-limiting phonons, which improves the coherence properties and sets the upper limit for the operating temperature. Negatively charged silicon-vacancy centers have an ordinary ground-state splitting of only 48GHz, resulting in required temperatures below one Kelvin, which can only be achieved by dilution refrigerators. Here, we increase the ground-state splitting by up to an order of magnitude by induced strain in a single-crystal diamond membrane. Furthermore, we demonstrate cavity-assisted spectroscopy enabled by coupling the emitter ensemble with a selectable strain to the mode of a Fabry-Perot microcavity. Calculation of the absorption cross-section yields σ_ens =4.9*10^-11 cm^2. Together with the Purcell-enhanced twofold reduction in emitter lifetime below 1ns, this makes the system a promising spin-photon interface at moderate temperatures of 4K.