2014/06/12 by Stephen J. DeVience, Linh M. Pham, Igor Lovchinsky +10 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.mes-hall #physics.chem-ph #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nnano.2014.313
arxiv created 2014/06/12 · arxiv updated 2015/06/22
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are well-established techniques that provide valuable information in a diverse set of disciplines but are currently limited to macroscopic sample volumes. Here we demonstrate nanoscale NMR spectroscopy and imaging under ambient conditions of samples containing multiple nuclear species, using nitrogen-vacancy (NV) colour centres in diamond as sensors. With single, shallow NV centres in a diamond chip and samples placed on the diamond surface, we perform NMR spectroscopy and one-dimensional MRI on few-nanometre-sized samples containing 1H and 19F nuclei. Alternatively, we employ a high-density NV layer near the surface of a diamond chip to demonstrate wide-field optical NMR spectroscopy of nanoscale samples containing 1H, 19F, and 31P nuclei, as well as multi-species two-dimensional optical MRI with sub-micron resolution. For all diamond samples exposed to air, we identify a ubiquitous 1H NMR signal, consistent with a ∼ 1 nm layer of adsorbed hydrocarbons or water on the diamond surface and below any sample placed on the diamond. This work lays the foundation for nanoscale NMR and MRI applications such as studies of single proteins and functional biological imaging with subcellular resolution, as well as characterization of thin films with sub-nanometre resolution.