Diamonds may contain color centers, such as the nitrogen-vacancy centers. With collaborators all over the world, we review the current state of affairs in using such centers to explore the behavior of materials in their superconducting regime
[1]. In particular, nitrogen-vacancy centers allow us to perform:
* vector magnetometry at a wide range of temperatures and pressures.
* magnetic field imaging with a resolution down to the nanometer scale.
* magnetic field sensing of static and alternating magnetic fields (up to the GHz range).
Picture (from [1], adapted from [2]):
[1] Victor M Acosta, Louis S Bouchard, Dmitry Budker, Ron Folman, Till Lenz, Patrick Maletinsky, Dominik Rohner, Yechezkel Schlussel, and Lucas Thiel, Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism 32, 85–95, (2019).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10948-018-4877-3
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.03282.pdf
[2] Phys. Rev. Appl. 10, 034032 (2018).
https://journals.aps.org/prapplied/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.10.034032