News about the project

In the field of nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) the sensitivity of a measurement is limited by the polarization of the target spins. At room temperature the thermal polarisation is minuscule and thus signal to noise ratio (SNR) is low. To overcome this limitation, the project partner NVision exploited optically induced electronic spin polarization of Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) centres in diamond to demonstrate for the first time hyperpolarization and direct nanoscale detection of spins in molecules external to the diamond. 

They have shown that using selective polarization and detection for nanoscale sensing could identify individual nuclear spin species under ambient conditions in both solid and liquid state samples.

This hyperpolarization method developed during the MetaboliQs project improves the SNR of current state of the art NMR techniques at the nanoscale and enables the study of spin diffusion processes and material properties at the diamond surface.