Guest_Jim_* Posted May 15, 2015 Posted May 15, 2015 Spin is a property of many particles and is at the heart of various technologies, but working with it can be challenging. Typically very powerful fields are necessary to measure it. That may be changing soon though, thanks to researchers at the Universities of Waterloo and Basel, and RWTH Aachen University. One of the technologies that measures spin is Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and doing so takes very powerful magnets, with those in MRI machines actually being superconducting electromagnets. This is despite the fact that the spin of particles produces weak magnetic fields. Ideally weak fields could also be used to measure it, but because of the weakness and noise, this has been impossible until now. According to the researcher's work, a small ferromagnetic particle could amplify the weak field, allowing a nitrogen-vacancy qubit to detect it from 30 nm away, and at room temperature. Without the particle, the distance would have to be 1-2 nm, which is infeasible. The hope is that this theoretical work could be used to develop superior NMR techniques for imaging biological materials, but more still needs to be done. At least this actually classical technique should be less fragile than other, quantum schemes. Source: University of Waterloo Back to original news post Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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