New tool simultaneously senses magnetic fields in various directions

Monday, October 15, 2018 - 01:22 in Physics & Chemistry

Imagine trying to make sense of the cacophony of a speaker playing four songs at once, and you have some idea of the challenge faced by Jenny Schloss and Matt Turner. In their quest to build a tool that uses NV centers — atomic-scale impurities in diamonds — to sense the magnetic fields in everything from firing neurons to condensed-matter systems, the pair of Ph.D. candidates from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have developed a method that can simultaneously detect magnetic fields in various directions. Schloss and Turner worked with postdoc John Barry (now a research scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory) in the laboratory of Ronald Walsworth, a faculty member in Harvard’s Center for Brain Science and the Department of Physics. Schloss, Turner, and Barry bombarded a tiny, 4-millimeter-square wafer of diamond with four different microwave signals, each of which was tuned to monitor a specific NV orientation and dithered according...

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