Nanoscale NMR spectroscopy and imaging of multiple nuclear species

Stephen J DeVience; Linh M Pham; Igor Lovchinsky; Alexander O Sushkov; Nir Bar-Gill; Chinmay Belthangady; Francesco Casola; Madeleine Corbett; Huiliang Zhang; Mikhail Lukin; Hongkun Park; Amir Yacoby; Ronald L Walsworth

doi:10.1038/nnano.2014.313

Nanoscale NMR spectroscopy and imaging of multiple nuclear species

Nat Nanotechnol. 2015 Feb;10(2):129-34. doi: 10.1038/nnano.2014.313. Epub 2015 Jan 5.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
² Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
³ Department of Physics, Harvard University, 17 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
⁴ 1] Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [2] Department of Physics, Harvard University, 17 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
⁵ Department of Applied Physics and Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University, Edmond J. Safra Campus, Jerusalem, Israel.
⁶ School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, 15 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
⁷ 1] Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [2] Department of Physics, Harvard University, 17 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [3] Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
⁸ 1] Department of Physics, Harvard University, 17 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [2] School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, 15 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
⁹ 1] Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [2] Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [3] Department of Physics, Harvard University, 17 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [4] Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.

PMID: 25559712
DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2014.313

Abstract

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide non-invasive information about multiple nuclear species in bulk matter, with wide-ranging applications from basic physics and chemistry to biomedical imaging. However, the spatial resolution of conventional NMR and MRI is limited to several micrometres even at large magnetic fields (>1 T), which is inadequate for many frontier scientific applications such as single-molecule NMR spectroscopy and in vivo MRI of individual biological cells. A promising approach for nanoscale NMR and MRI exploits optical measurements of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) colour centres in diamond, which provide a combination of magnetic field sensitivity and nanoscale spatial resolution unmatched by any existing technology, while operating under ambient conditions in a robust, solid-state system. Recently, single, shallow NV centres were used to demonstrate NMR of nanoscale ensembles of proton spins, consisting of a statistical polarization equivalent to ∼100-1,000 spins in uniform samples covering the surface of a bulk diamond chip. Here, we realize nanoscale NMR spectroscopy and MRI of multiple nuclear species ((1)H, (19)F, (31)P) in non-uniform (spatially structured) samples under ambient conditions and at moderate magnetic fields (∼20 mT) using two complementary sensor modalities.

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Models, Theoretical*
Nitrogen / chemistry*
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Biomolecular / methods*

Substances

Nitrogen