Ambient nanoscale sensing with single spins using quantum decoherence

LP McGuinness; LT Hall; A Stacey; DA Simpson; CD Hill; JH Cole; K Ganesan; BC Gibson; S Prawer; P Mulvaney; F Jelezko; J Wrachtrup; RE Scholten; LCL Hollenberg

Journal article

Ambient nanoscale sensing with single spins using quantum decoherence

LP McGuinness, LT Hall, A Stacey, DA Simpson, CD Hill, JH Cole, K Ganesan, BC Gibson, S Prawer, P Mulvaney, F Jelezko, J Wrachtrup, RE Scholten, LCL Hollenberg

New Journal of Physics | Published : 2013

DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/15/7/073042

Abstract

Magnetic resonance detection is one of the most important tools used in life-sciences today. However, as the technique detects the magnetization of large ensembles of spins it is fundamentally limited in spatial resolution to mesoscopic scales. Here we detect the natural fluctuations of nanoscale spin ensembles at ambient temperatures by measuring the decoherence rate of a single quantum spin in response to introduced extrinsic target spins. In our experiments 45 nm nanodiamonds with single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) spins were immersed in solution containing spin 5/2 Mn2+ ions and the NV decoherence rate measured though optically detected magnetic resonance. The presence of both freely moving an..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

David Simpson Author

Jared Cole Author

Kumaravelu Ganesan Author

Steven Prawer Author

Related Projects (1)

Quantum Nanotechnology: Concepts to Devices

Just as the technological advances of the past few decades at the micro level fundamentally changed our lives, so too the emerging era of 'q..

Grants

Awarded by European Commission

Funding Acknowledgements

The authors thank S Steinert for a critical reading of the paper. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under the Centre of Excellence (CE110001027) and Discovery Project (DP0770715) schemes, ERC Project SQUTEC, EU Project DINAMO, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Baden-Wuerttemberg Foundation.