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High-sensitivity diamond magnetometer with nanoscale resolution

Nature Physics volume 4, pages 810–816 (2008)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 01 February 2011

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Abstract

The detection of weak magnetic fields with high spatial resolution is an important problem in diverse areas ranging from fundamental physics and material science to data storage and biomedical science. Here, we explore a novel approach to the detection of weak magnetic fields that takes advantage of recently developed techniques for the coherent control of solid-state electron spin quantum bits. Specifically, we investigate a magnetic sensor based on nitrogen-vacancy centres in room-temperature diamond. We discuss two important applications of this technique: a nanoscale magnetometer that could potentially detect precession of single nuclear spins and an optical magnetic-field imager combining spatial resolution ranging from micrometres to millimetres with a sensitivity approaching a few fT Hz−1/2.

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Figure 1: Overview of a diamond-based magnetometer.
Figure 2: Control sequences for various operation modes of the magnetometer and corresponding sensitivities to magnetic fields.
Figure 3: Sensitivity per root volume (ηVa.c.) at high nitrogen-vacancy-centre density, for the a.c.-field echo measurement scheme.
Figure 4: Illustration of high-spatial-resolution magnetometry with a diamond nanocrystal.

Change history

  • 01 February 2011

    In the version of this Article originally published, the x axis of Fig. 2b was labelled incorrectly. This has now been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge conversations with D. Awschalom, A. Cohen, J. Doyle, G. Dutt, J. Maze, E. Togan, P. Stanwix, J. Hodges, S. Hong and M. P. Ledbetter. This work was supported by the NSF, ONR, MURI, DARPA and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. J.M.T. is supported by the Pappalardo Fellowship; P.C. is supported by the ITAMP Fellowship.

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Author notes

  1. J. M. Taylor and P. Cappellaro: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

    J. M. Taylor

  2. Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

    P. Cappellaro, L. Childress, L. Jiang, A. Yacoby, R. Walsworth & M. D. Lukin

  3. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

    P. Cappellaro, R. Walsworth & M. D. Lukin

  4. Department of Physics, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine 04240, USA

    L. Childress

  5. Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    D. Budker

  6. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA

    P. R. Hemmer

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Taylor, J., Cappellaro, P., Childress, L. et al. High-sensitivity diamond magnetometer with nanoscale resolution. Nature Phys 4, 810–816 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1075

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