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 imaging1. However, the spatial resolution of conventional NMR and MRI is limited2 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 system3,4,5. 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 chip6,7. Here, we realize nanoscale NMR spectroscopy and MRI of multiple nuclear species (1H, 19F, 31P) in non-uniform (spatially structured) samples under ambient conditions and at moderate magnetic fields (∼20 mT) using two complementary sensor modalities.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$259.00 per year
only $21.58 per issue
Rent or buy this article
Prices vary by article type
from$1.95
to$39.95
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
16 January 2015
In the version of this Letter originally published online, in Fig. 4f, there was a superfluous blue curve. This error has now been corrected in all versions of the Letter.
References
Mansfield, P. Snapshot magnetic resonance imaging (Nobel lecture). Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 43, 5456–5464 (2004).
Glover, P. & Mansfield, P. Limits to magnetic resonance microscopy. Rep. Progr. Phys. 65, 1489 (2002).
Taylor, J. M. et al. High-sensitivity diamond magnetometer with nanoscale resolution. Nature Phys. 4, 810–816 (2008).
Maze, J. R. et al. Nanoscale magnetic sensing with an individual electronic spin in diamond. Nature 455, 644–647 (2008).
Balasubramanian, G. et al. Nanoscale imaging magnetometry with diamond spins under ambient conditions. Nature 455, 648–651 (2008).
Mamin, H. J. et al. Nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance with a nitrogen vacancy center. Science 339, 557–560 (2013).
Staudacher, T. et al. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy on a (5-nanometer)3 sample volume. Science 339, 561–563 (2013).
Bending, S. J. Local magnetic probes of superconductors. Adv. Phys. 48, 449–535 (1999).
Budker, D. & Romalis, M. Optical magnetometry. Nature Phys. 3, 227–234 (2007).
Nowack, K. C. et al. Imaging currents in HgTe quantum wells in the quantum spin Hall regime. Nature Mater. 12, 787–791 (2013).
Rugar, D., Budakian, R., Mamin, H. J. & Chui, B. W. Single spin detection by magnetic resonance force microscopy. Nature 430, 329–332 (2004).
Degen, C., Poggio, M., Mamin, H., Rettner, C. & Rugar, D. Nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 106, 1313–1317 (2009).
Childress, L. et al. Coherent dynamics of coupled electron and nuclear spin qubits in diamond. Science 314, 281–285 (2006).
Bar-Gill, N. et al. Suppression of spin-bath dynamics for improved coherence of multi-spin-qubit systems. Nature Commun. 3, 858 (2012).
Belthangady, C. et al. Dressed-state resonant coupling between bright and dark spins in diamond. Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 157601 (2013).
Kolkowitz, S., Unterreithmeier, Q. P., Bennett, S. D. & Lukin, M. D. Sensing distant nuclear spins with a single electron spin. Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 137601 (2012).
Taminiau, T. et al. Detection and control of individual nuclear spins using a weakly coupled electron spin. Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 137602 (2012).
Grinolds, M. S. et al. Sub-nanometer resolution in three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging of individual dark spins. Nature Nanotech. 9, 279–284 (2014).
Grinolds, M. S. et al. Nanoscale magnetic imaging of a single electron spin under ambient conditions. Nature Phys. 9, 215–219 (2013).
Loretz, M., Pezzagna, S., Meijer, J. & Degen, C. L. Nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance with a 1.9-nm-deep nitrogen-vacancy sensor. Appl. Phys. Lett. 104, 033102 (2014).
Sushkov, A. O. et al. All-optical sensing of a single-molecule electron spin. Nano Lett. 14, 6443–6448 (2014).
Le Sage, D. et al. Optical magnetic imaging of living cells. Nature 496, 486–489 (2013).
Sushkov, A. O. et al. Magnetic resonance detection of individual proton spins using quantum reporters. Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 197601 (2014).
Pham, L. M. et al. Magnetic field imaging with nitrogen-vacancy ensembles. New J. Phys. 13, 045021 (2011).
Gullion, T., Baker, D. B. & Conradi, M. S. New, compensated Carr–Purcell sequences. J. Magn. Reson. 89, 479–484 (1990).
de Lange, G., Ristè, D., Dobrovitski, V. V. & Hanson, R. Single-spin magnetometry with multi-pulse dynamical decoupling sequences. Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 080802 (2011).
Naydenov, B. et al. Dynamical decoupling of a single-electron spin at room temperature. Phys. Rev. B 83, 081201 (2011).
Ryan, C. A., Hodges, J. S. & Cory, D. G. Robust decoupling techniques to extend quantum coherence in diamond. Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 200402 (2010).
Bar-Gill, N., Pham, L. M., Jarmola, A., Budker, D. & Walsworth, R. Solid-state electronic spin coherence time approaching one second. Nature Commun. 4, 1743 (2013).
Cywiński, Ł., Lutchyn, R. M., Nave, C. P. & Das Sarma, S. How to enhance dephasing time in superconducting qubits. Phys. Rev. B 77, 174509 (2008).
Bylander, J. et al. Noise spectroscopy through dynamical decoupling with a superconducting flux qubit. Nature Phys. 7, 565–570 (2011).
Hall, L. T., Cole, J. H., Hill, C. D. & Hollenberg, L. C. L. Sensing of fluctuating nanoscale magnetic fields using nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond. Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 220802 (2009).
Fuller, G. H. Nuclear Spins and Moments (American Chemical Society, 1976).
Mamin, H. et al. Isotope-selective detection and imaging of organic nanolayers. Nano Lett. 9, 3020–3024 (2009).
Xue, F., Weber, D. P., Peddibhotla, P. & Poggio, M. Measurement of statistical nuclear spin polarization in a nanoscale GaAs sample. Phys. Rev. B 84, 205328 (2011).
Arai, K. et al. Fourier magnetic imaging with nanoscale resolution and compressed sensing speed-up using electronic spins in diamond. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2749 (2014).
Kessler, E. M., Lovchinsky, I., Sushkov, A. O. & Lukin, M. D. Quantum error correction for metrology. Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 150802 (2014).
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency QuASAR programme. F.C. acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation. I.L. acknowledges support from a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellowship.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
S.J.D.V. and L.M.P. contributed equally to this work. R.L.W., S.J.D., L.M.P. and N.B-G. conceived the idea of the study. S.J.D., L.M.P., I.L., A.O.S. and M.C. performed the measurements and analysed the data. F.C. and S.J.D. developed the model for describing the signal. H.Z. and C.B. created the SiO2 masks. M.D.L., H.P., R.L.W. and A.Y. conceived the NV-diamond wide-field magnetic imager and its applications. R.L.W. supervised the project. All authors discussed the results and participated in writing the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary information
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information (PDF 370 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
DeVience, S., Pham, L., Lovchinsky, I. et al. Nanoscale NMR spectroscopy and imaging of multiple nuclear species. Nature Nanotech 10, 129–134 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2014.313
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2014.313