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High-sensitivity diamond magnetometer with nanoscale resolution

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.

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  • 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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Correspondence to M. D. Lukin.

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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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