Dressed-State Polarization Transfer between Bright & Dark Spins in   Diamond
  Under ambient conditions, spin impurities in solid-state systems are found in thermally-mixed states and are optically "dark", i.e., the spin states cannot be optically controlled. Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are an exception in that the electronic spin states are "bright", i.e., they can be polarized by optical pumping, coherently manipulated with spin-resonance techniques, and read out optically, all at room temperature. Here we demonstrate a dressed-state, double-resonance scheme to transfer polarization from bright NV electronic spins to dark substitutional-Nitrogen (P1) electronic spins in diamond. This polarization-transfer mechanism could be used to cool a mesoscopic bath of dark spins to near-zero temperature, thus providing a resource for quantum information and sensing, and aiding studies of quantum effects in many-body spin systems. 
Chinmay Belthangady, N. Bar-Gill, L. M. Pham, K. Arai, D. Le Sage, P.   Cappellaro, and R. L. Walsworth
quant-ph cond-mat.mes-hall physics.atom-ph