UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium
Ronald Walsworth, Harvard University
“Nanoscale Magnetic Imaging using Quantum Defects in Diamond”
Nitrogen vacancy (NV) color centers are quantum defects in diamond that provide an unpar-alleled combination of magnetic field sensitivity and spatial resolution in a room-temperature solid, with wide-ranging applications in both the physical and life sciences. NV centers can be brought into few nanometer proximity of magnetic field sources of interest while maintain-ing long NV electronic spin coherence times, a large (~Bohr magneton) Zeeman shift of the NV spin states, and optical preparation and readout of the NV spin. Recent applications of NV-diamond magnetometry include magnetic imaging of living cells, single proton MRI, sin-gle protein NMR, mapping magnetic signatures in >4 billion-year-old meteorites and early-Earth rocks, magnetic sensing of single neuron action potentials, and characterizing advanced materials such as spin torque oscillators. I will provide an overview of this technology and its applications.