Karaveli Sinan, Gaathon Ophir, Wolcott Abraham, Sakakibara Reyu, Shemesh Or A, Peterka Darcy S, Boyden Edward S, Owen Jonathan S, Yuste Rafael, Englund Dirk
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139; Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027;
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139; Diamond Nanotechnologies, Inc., Boston, MA 02134;
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Apr 12;113(15):3938-43. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1504451113. Epub 2016 Mar 24.
The negatively charged nitrogen vacancy (NV(-)) center in diamond has attracted strong interest for a wide range of sensing and quantum information processing applications. To this end, recent work has focused on controlling the NV charge state, whose stability strongly depends on its electrostatic environment. Here, we demonstrate that the charge state and fluorescence dynamics of single NV centers in nanodiamonds with different surface terminations can be controlled by an externally applied potential difference in an electrochemical cell. The voltage dependence of the NV charge state can be used to stabilize the NV(-) state for spin-based sensing protocols and provides a method of charge state-dependent fluorescence sensing of electrochemical potentials. We detect clear NV fluorescence modulation for voltage changes down to 100 mV, with a single NV and down to 20 mV with multiple NV centers in a wide-field imaging mode. These results suggest that NV centers in nanodiamonds could enable parallel optical detection of biologically relevant electrochemical potentials.
金刚石中的带负电荷的氮空位(NV(-))中心因其在广泛的传感和量子信息处理应用中具有很强的吸引力。为此,最近的工作集中在控制NV电荷态,其稳定性强烈依赖于其静电环境。在这里,我们证明了在具有不同表面终止的纳米金刚石中,单个NV中心的电荷态和荧光动力学可以通过电化学电池中外部施加的电势差来控制。NV电荷态的电压依赖性可用于稳定基于自旋的传感协议中的NV(-)态,并提供一种对电化学势进行电荷态依赖性荧光传感的方法。在宽场成像模式下,我们检测到单个NV中心对于低至100 mV的电压变化有明显的NV荧光调制,多个NV中心对于低至20 mV的电压变化也有明显的NV荧光调制。这些结果表明,纳米金刚石中的NV中心能够实现对生物相关电化学势的并行光学检测。