Magnetic field noise analyses generated by the interactions between a nitrogen vacancy center diamond and surface and bulk impurities

We investigated the mechanism of magnetic noise due to both surface and bulk impurities. For surface noise, we apply the Langevin method to spin fluctuation theory to calculate the noise for paramagnetic surface impurities absorbed in a thin layer of water. We find that the mechanisms generating noise are spin flip and spin precession which depend on impurity spin relaxation and spin precession time. For the bulk noise, we consider carbon-13 and nitrogen as impurities and employ the correlated-cluster expansion to calculate noise. Carbon-13 noise is a few orders of magnitude larger than nitrogen due to the higher impurity density in the typical NV center diamond system. We also find that the noise in the secular approximation underestimates noise under low applied magnetic field. Overall, the major source of magnetic field noise is spin precession noise, which is more than five orders of magnitude larger than the spin flip noise. •Magnetic field noise in nitrogen vacancy center diamonds.•Surface and bulk impurity noise in nitrogen vacancy center diamonds.•Magnetic field noise is generated from spin flip and spin precession that compete.•Spin precession noise is the dominate noise mechanism in NV center diamonds.