New measurement technology – Imaging with NV centers
Since the discovery of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in the 1990s, they have increasingly developed from research objects to research tools. An NV center is a point defect in the crystal structure of a diamond. This quantum system has excellent stability even at room temperature, so that it is now widely used, e.g. as a qubit or as a component of a magnetometer.
A few years ago, the first measurement technology manufacturers began to equip scanning probe microscopes with NV centers in order to use them as magnetometers with high spatial resolution. The American manufacturer Q-CAT has chosen an innovative approach that opens up completely new measurement possibilities. Instead of positioning a single NV center on the tip of a cantilever, the Quantum Diamond Microscope from Q-CAT uses a sensor that contains a large number of NV centers. This allows an area of several millimeters to be measured simultaneously. For the first time it has become possible to image the magnetization in real time with an extremely high sensitivity that is otherwise only known from SQUID magnetometers. Compared to a scanning SQUID, the technology offers significantly better spatial resolution. Not only is the field strength of the sample measured at a specific location, but also the local field vector. Applications are e.g:
- 2D materials
- Measurements of magnetic domains in moire magnetism
- Examination of Dirac liquids
- Photovoltaics
- Determination of current flows in PV components
- Electronic components
- Measurement of the magnetic fingerprint and analysis of individual components in integrated circuits
- Paleomagnetism
- Distribution of different minerals in a rock sample
- Determination of the detrital portion of speleothems
- Meteorite analysis
- Biomagnetism
- Single cell detection in blood
- Imaging of magnetic bacteria with sub-cell resolution
Read more about this topic in our article “Quantum Diamond Microscope II – Imaging of
electrical currents”.