Advances from Salahuddin Group on Detecting Magnetic Fields with Diamond Dust Generates Buzz in the Research Community

ABSTRACT

Magnetic sensing technology has found widespread application in a diverse set of industries including transportation, medicine, and resource exploration. These uses often require highly sensitive instruments to measure the extremely small magnetic fields involved, relying on difficult-to-integrate superconducting quantum interference devices and spin-exchange relaxation-free magnetometers. A potential alternative, nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, has shown great potential as a high-sensitivity and high-resolution magnetic sensor capable of operating in an unshielded, room-temperature environment. Transitioning NV center–based sensors into practical devices, however, is impeded by the need for high-power radio frequency (RF) excitation to manipulate them. We report an advance that combines two different physical phenomena to enable a highly efficient excitation of the NV centers: magnetoelastic drive of ferromagnetic resonance and NV-magnon coupling. Our work demonstrates a new pathway that combine acoustics and magnonics that enables highly energy-efficient and local excitation of NV centers without the need for any external RF excitation and, thus, could lead to completely integrated, on-chip, atomic sensors.

Full article: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/9/eaat6574

Berkeley News: http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/09/10/diamond-dust-enables-low-cost-high-efficiency-magnetic-field-detection/

Image credit: Chemical News (https://www.chemicalnews.org/magnetic-field-detected-economically-by-diamond-dust/)