Among a variety of layered materials used as building blocks in van der Waals heterostructures, hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) appears as an ideal platform for hosting optically active defects owing to its large band gap ($\sim 6 \mathrm{eV}$). Here we study the optical response of a high-purity hBN crystal under green laser illumination. By means of photon correlation measurements, we identify individual defects emitting a highly photostable fluorescence under ambient conditions. A detailed analysis of the photophysical properties reveals a high quantum efficiency of the radiative transition, leading to a single photon source with very high brightness ($\sim 4\times {10}^6\text{counts} {\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$). These results illustrate how the wide range of applications offered by hBN could be further extended to photonic-based quantum information science and metrology.

Magnetic skyrmions are topological magnetic textures that hold great promise as nanoscale bits of information in memory and logic devices. Although room-temperature ferromagnetic skyrmions and their current-induced manipulation have been demonstrated, their velocity has been limited to about 100 meters per second. In addition, their dynamics are perturbed by the skyrmion Hall effect, a motion transverse to the current direction caused by the skyrmion topological charge. Here, we show that skyrmions in compensated synthetic antiferromagnets can be moved by current along the current direction at velocities of up to 900 meters per second. This can be explained by the cancellation of the net topological charge leading to a vanishing skyrmion Hall effect. Our results open an important path toward the realization of logic and memory devices based on the fast manipulation of skyrmions in tracks.

We analyze the impact of electric field and magnetic field fluctuations in the decoherence of the electronic spin associated with a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect in diamond. To this end, we tune the amplitude of a magnetic field in order to engineer spin eigenstates protected either against magnetic noise or against electric noise. The competition between these noise sources is analyzed quantitatively by changing their relative strength through modifications of the host diamond material. This study provides significant insights into the decoherence of the NV electronic spin, which is valuable for quantum metrology and sensing applications.

Antiferromagnetic materials are promising platforms for next-generation spintronics owing to their fast dynamics and high robustness against parasitic magnetic fields. However, nanoscale imaging of the magnetic order in such materials with zero net magnetization remains a major experimental challenge. Here we show that non-collinear antiferromagnetic spin textures can be imaged by probing the magnetic noise they locally produce via thermal populations of magnons. To this end, we perform nanoscale, all-optical relaxometry with a scanning quantum sensor based on a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect in diamond. Magnetic noise is detected through an increase of the spin relaxation rate of the NV defect, which results in an overall reduction of its photoluminescence signal under continuous laser illumination. As a proof-of-concept, the efficiency of the method is demonstrated by imaging various spin textures in synthetic antiferromagnets, including domain walls, spin spirals and antiferromagnetic skyrmions. This imaging procedure could be extended to a large class of intrinsic antiferromagnets and opens up new opportunities for studying the physics of localized spin wave modes for magnonics.

Spin defects in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) are promising quantum systems for the design of flexible two-dimensional quantum sensing platforms. Here we rely on hBN crystals isotopically enriched with either ¹⁰B or ¹¹B to investigate the isotope-dependent properties of a spin defect featuring a broadband photoluminescence signal in the near infrared. By analyzing the hyperfine structure of the spin defect while changing the boron isotope, we first confirm that it corresponds to the negatively charged boron-vacancy center ( $${{{{{{{{\rm{V}}}}}}}}}_{{{{{{{{\rm{B}}}}}}}}}^{-}$$V B − ). We then show that its spin coherence properties are slightly improved in ¹⁰B-enriched samples. This is supported by numerical simulations employing cluster correlation expansion methods, which reveal the importance of the hyperfine Fermi contact term for calculating the coherence time of point defects in hBN. Using cross-relaxation spectroscopy, we finally identify dark electron spin impurities as an additional source of decoherence. This work provides new insights into the properties of $${{{{{{{{\rm{V}}}}}}}}}_{{{{{{{{\rm{B}}}}}}}}}^{-}$$V B − spin defects, which are valuable for the future development of hBN-based quantum sensing foils.

The Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) has recently attracted considerable interest owing to its fundamental role in the stabilization of chiral spin textures in ultrathin ferromagnets, which are interesting candidates for future spintronic technologies. Here we employ a scanning nanomagnetometer based on a single nitrogen-vacancy defect in diamond to locally probe the strength of the interfacial DMI in $\mathrm{CoFeB}|\mathrm{MgO}$ ultrathin films grown on different heavy metal underlayers $X=\text{Ta}$, TaN, and W. By measuring the stray field emanating from domain walls in micron-long wires of such materials, we observe deviations from the Bloch profile for TaN and W underlayers that are consistent with a positive DMI value favoring right-handed chiral spin structures. Moreover, our measurements suggest that the DMI constant might vary locally within a single sample, illustrating the importance of local probes for the study of magnetic order at the nanoscale.