Optimal control for duty-cycle-limited interferometry with single-NV centers

Abstract

Stimulus-responsive hydrogels convert temperature changes into magnetic-field shifts detectable by nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers, enabling nanoscale thermometry in soft and biological environments. Existing hydrogel-nanodiamond demonstrations rely on NV ensembles, whose high photon throughput is accompanied by gradient-induced inhomogeneous broadening, while idealized single-NV projections assume high-fluence fluorescence/ODMR readout. Here we study a pulsed single-NV route for the same class of sensors and ask whether decoherence-aware coherent control can improve thermometric performance over optimized Ramsey interrogation at equal detected-photon budget. Using a sigmoidal volume-phase-transition model, dipolar magnetic transduction, and Lindblad master-equation simulations, we find a reproducible 25-27% per-shot sensitivity gain over optimized Ramsey, i.e., a 57-60% gain in Fisher information (1.57-1.60). The same gain carries over to the photon-normalized Fisher information. The rate gain is governed by the measurement duty cycle, the fraction of the experimental cycle spent accumulating signal rather than initializing, reading out or waiting, and becomes largest when the overhead or optical-dose constraint dominates the cycle time. The optimized trajectories reveal a response-shaping mechanism in which phase accumulation is concentrated near the end of the sequence, and a closed-form depth-two solution reproduces the numerical optimum and exhibits that mechanism analytically. The advantage is most pronounced when the dephasing time is short compared with the measurement overhead or dose-limited waiting time, which is the operating regime targeted by hydrogel-transduced single-spin biosensing.