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Nanoscale NMR spectroscopy and imaging of multiple nuclear species

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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.

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Figure 1: NV NMR experiment.
Figure 2: Multi-species nanoscale NMR with a single shallow NV centre.
Figure 3: Multi-species nanoscale NMR with a shallow NV ensemble.
Figure 4: Optical MRI of multi-species sample with sub-micrometre structure.
Figure 5: Determination of surface proton layer thickness.

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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.

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

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

Correspondence to Ronald L. Walsworth.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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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

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