nv centers

We all know that diamonds can hold great sentimental (and monetary) value. As luck may have it, diamonds—particularly defective ones, with little errors in their crystal structure—also hold great scientific value. The defects have properties that can only be described by quantum mechanics, and researchers are working on harnessing these properties to pick up on tiny signals coming from individual biological cells.

JQI group uses diamond-based quantum sensors produce images of currents in graphene.

The word “defect” doesn’t usually have a good connotation--often indicating failure. But for physicists, one common defect known as a nitrogen-vacancy center (NV center) has applications in both quantum information processing and ultra-sensitive magnetometry, the measurement of exceedingly faint magnetic fields. In an experiment, recently published in Science, JQI Fellow Vladimir Manucharyan and colleagues at Harvard University used NV centers in diamond to sense the properties of magnetic field noise tens of nanometers away from the silver samples.
Diamond, which is a vast array of carbon atoms, can contain a wide variety of defects. An NV center defect is formed when a nitrogen atom substitutes for a carbon atom and is adjacent...