Coherent all-optical control of the germanium vacancy in diamond

The germanium vacancy in diamond (GeV) is a promising candidate for color center based quantum networking. Yet, like for other group-IV vacancy defects in diamond, achieving fast, high-fidelity qubit operations using traditional magnetic resonance techniques is experimentally challenging due to a weak magnetic dipole and susceptibility to thermally induced decoherence. Here, we perform all-optical control of the GeV and realize Rabi frequencies exceeding $\sim 20$~MHz. We do so by driving the two $Λ$-systems of the GeV simultaneously and apply this to probe the spin coherence ($T_2^*=224\pm14$~ns, $T_2^{\rm H}=11.9\pm0.3$~$μ$s). Our control scheme is applicable to other color centers and particularly, other group-IV defects for which, the scheme may be optimized to improve all-optical control in these systems.