Trading carats for nanometers - and defective diamonds for crystal clear microscopy
Monday, March 2, 2009 - 17:01
in Physics & Chemistry
(PhysOrg.com) -- Large, perfect diamonds are precious to almost all of us but to some scientists, it is the defects that really matter. This is because defects can form nanoscopic color centers, which play a key role in the development of both quantum computing and quantum cryptography. A research team at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen has now probed these color centers inside the crystal with unprecedented resolution using an optical microscope. Using STED microscopy, the scientists identified even densely packed color centers and determined their position inside the crystal with a precision better than 0.15 nanometers, corresponding to the dimension of an atom. (Nature Photonics, 22nd February 2009).