Brilliant hard drive quality with magnetic field sensors made of diamond
Quantum mechanics is not only of high interest in fundamental research. The current progress in quantum technologies promises numerous innovations of industrial relevance, which will be transferred into the economy within the next five to ten years. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF, the University of Stuttgart, and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research are developing highly sensitive diamond probes as a basis for novel quantum sensors. These are able to characterize smallest magnetic fields with a spatial resolution in the nanometer range. In the future, these probes will be used for the analysis and inspection of magnetic storage media in order to identify defective hard drive segments and thus considerably reduce rejection rates and production costs. A further field of application could be the characterization of biological substances, e. g. proteins. The research program "NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) at the Nanoscale" was...