Spins in diamond for quantum bio-sensing and for quantum control of nuclear spin ensembles

Diamond-based quantum sensors that utilise the electronic spin of nitrogen-vacancy defects have applications in probing phenomena both in soft and solid-state systems. They promise advances in understanding the complexity of interacting quantum systems, and in developing new diagnostics and treatment technologies for healthcare.
In this talk, I will present our latest results on performing nanoscale quantum sensing in living cells for reporting two parameters simultaneously: temperature and viscosity.1,2,3 Temperature and viscosity are key parameters of interest that relate to cellular energetics and metabolism, morphological changes, cell division and active transport. The ability to correlate different parameters can help shed light on the development of cellular malfunction at the onset of a disease.
I will further discuss our recent work on enhanced nuclear spin initialisation in diamond, where we demonstrate how a recently developed pulsed protocol4 can provide advantages over more established techniques. This can support the realisation of highly controlled spin ensembles for probing quantum many-body effects in spin-based quantum simulator systems.

[1] S. Belser et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 123 (2023) 020501
[2] Q. Gu et al., ACS Nano 2023, 17 (2023) 20034−20042
[3] L. Shanahan et al., arXiv:2406.01181 (2024)
[4] O. Whaites et al., Phys. Rev. Res. 4, 013214 (2022)