Periodic driving has emerged as a powerful tool to control, engineer, and characterize many-body quantum systems. However, the required pulse sequences are often complex, long, or require the ability to control the individual degrees of freedom. In this work, we study how a simple Carr-Purcell–Meiboom-Gill (CPMG)-like pulse sequence can be leveraged to enhance the coherence of a large ensemble of spin qubits and serve as an important characterization tool. We implement the periodic drive on an ensemble of dense nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond and examine the effect of pulse rotation offset as a control parameter on the dynamics. We use a single diamond sample prepared with several spots of varying NV density, which, in turn, varies the NV-NV dipolar interaction strength. Counterintuitively, we find that rotation offsets deviating from the ideal 𝜋 pulse in the CPMG sequence (often classified as pulse errors) play a critical role in preserving coherence along an axis set by the 𝜋 pulses even at nominally zero rotation offset. The cause of the coherence preservation is an emergent effective field that scales linearly with the magnitude of the rotation offset for small offsets. In addition to extending coherence, we compare the rotation offset dependence of coherence to numerical simulations to measure the disorder and dipolar contributions to the Hamiltonian to quantitatively extract the densities of the constituent spin species within the diamond.

For the past three decades nanoscience has widely affected many areas in physics, chemistry and engineering, and has led to numerous fundamental discoveries, as well as applications and products. Concurrently, quantum science and technology has developed into a cross-disciplinary research endeavour connecting these same areas and holds burgeoning commercial promise. Although quantum physics dictates the behaviour of nanoscale objects, quantum coherence, which is central to quantum information, communication and sensing, has not played an explicit role in much of nanoscience. This Review describes fundamental principles and practical applications of quantum coherence in nanoscale systems, a research area we call quantum-coherent nanoscience. We structure this Review according to specific degrees of freedom that can be quantum-coherently controlled in a given nanoscale system, such as charge, spin, mechanical motion and photons. We review the current state of the art and focus on outstanding challenges and opportunities unlocked by the merging of nanoscience and coherent quantum operations.