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Angstrom-Resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Single Molecules via Wave-Function Fingerprints of Nuclear Spins

Wen-Long Ma and Ren-Bao Liu*

  • Department of Physics and Centre for Quantum Coherence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong, China

  • *Corresponding author. rbliu@phy.cuhk.edu.hk
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Phys. Rev. Applied 6, 024019 – Published 26 August, 2016

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.6.024019

Abstract

Single-molecule sensitivity of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and angstrom resolution of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are the highest challenges in magnetic microscopy. Recent development in dynamical-decoupling- (DD) enhanced diamond quantum sensing has enabled single-nucleus NMR and nanoscale NMR. Similar to conventional NMR and MRI, current DD-based quantum sensing utilizes the “frequency fingerprints” of target nuclear spins. The frequency fingerprints by their nature cannot resolve different nuclear spins that have the same noise frequency or differentiate different types of correlations in nuclear-spin clusters, which limit the resolution of single-molecule MRI. Here we show that this limitation can be overcome by using “wave-function fingerprints” of target nuclear spins, which is much more sensitive than the frequency fingerprints to the weak hyperfine interaction between the targets and a sensor under resonant DD control. We demonstrate a scheme of angstrom-resolution MRI that is capable of counting and individually localizing single nuclear spins of the same frequency and characterizing the correlations in nuclear-spin clusters. A nitrogen-vacancy-center spin sensor near a diamond surface, provided that the coherence time is improved by surface engineering in the near future, may be employed to determine with angstrom resolution the positions and conformation of single molecules that are isotope labeled. The scheme in this work offers an approach to breaking the resolution limit set by the “frequency gradients” in conventional MRI and to reaching the angstrom-scale resolution.

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Phys. Rev. Applied 6, 024019– Published 26 August, 2016
  • Received 6 December 2015

© 2016 American Physical Society

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