Researchers develop Ultrasensitive Magnetic-field Detector
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have built a new ultrasensitive magnetic-field detector which is about thousand times stronger than the detector's previous version.
According to reports, the detector could be used to power imaging equipment, medical devices of small size and even in geological exploration. Magnetometers are also used in such application, but some equipment relies on gas chambers, while some could work in narrow frequency bands, according to Live Science.
Synthetic diamonds with nitrogen vacancies (NVs) have been promising as the basis for portable magnetometers. A small diamond chip about one-twentieth the size of a thumbnail is able to contain trillions of nitrogen vacancies. Every nitrogen vacancy is capable of performing its own magnetic-field measurement.
Previously, researchers have undergone many challenges to unite a number of measurements to able to find out such measurements. Researchers are said to use the nitrogen vacancies with a laser light. The intensity of the laser light helps in showing the magnetic condition.
According to News Maine, Dirk Englund, the Jamieson Career Development Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and one of the designers of the new device, said, "In the past, only a small fraction of the pump light was used to excite a small fraction of the NVs. We make use of almost all the pump light to measure almost all of the NV".
The new detector by the researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been reported in 'Nature Physics', scientific journal published by Nature Publishing Group in the United Kingdom.
Senior authors Englund and Danielle Braje, a physicist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, worked with Matthew Trashier and Carson Teal, students of Englund, to develop the new ultrasensitive magnetic-field detector.