LAUSR

The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has a wide range of potential applications in quantum metrology, communications and computation. The key to its use lies in how large the optical spin contrast is and the associated fidelity of spin state readout. In this paper we propose a new mechanism for improving contrast with a spin-to-charge protocol that relies on the use of an external electrode and cryogenic temperatures to discretise the diamond conduction band for spin-selective resonant photoionization. We use effective mass theory to calculate the discrete eigenenergies in this new system and use them to formulate a new spin-to-charge protocol that involves resonant photoionization out the NV ground state into the diamond conduction band. The major sources of broadening are also addressed which guide the design of the experiment. With this mechanism we theorise an optical spin contrast that and an associated spin readout fidelity of 85%. This significant improvement can be applied to a number of cryogenic quantum technologies.