Somewhere in the quantum realm, a teeny, little rave is going on. Researchers have created ultra-small diamonds, the size of 350 strands of human DNA, which emit light like a disco ball as they spin more than a billion times a minute.
The fun party decorations are the creation of Purdue University scientists, who are using them to make highly accurate measurements that could help shed light on the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity. There have been previous attempts to extract nanodiamonds, but actually making them work requires incredibly specific conditions.
“In the past, experiments with these floating diamonds have had trouble preventing their loss in the vacuum and studying the spin qubits,” Tongcang Li, a professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue, said in a statement. “However, in our work, we successfully extracted diamond from a vacuum using a special ion trap. For the first time, we can observe and control the behavior of spin qubits inside a crystal diamond in a vacuum.”
Qubits, the quantum versions of computer bits, are the basic unit of quantum information, where a semiconducting material is used to tune individual electron charges and their relative spins. To create the necessary conditions to study how the rotation of the diamond affected the spin qubits, the researchers had to spin the diamond at an incredible speed of 1.2 billion revolutions per minute.
They were able to do this by creating a 300-nanometer-thick layer of sapphire with gold, using photolithography, the same method used to make computer chips. The diamonds themselves, measuring an average of 750 nanometers in diameter, are created using high pressure and high temperatures, accelerating the natural process that gives us crystal clear stones. Diamonds contained tiny structures that could hold electron spin qubits.
To measure the diamond’s rotation, it was hit with a green laser, causing it to emit red light. That light, in turn, allowed researchers to determine the electrons’ spin states. Another laser was used to monitor the rotation of the nanodiamond. As it spun, the nanodiamond scattered the infrared light of the lasers, like a disco ball.
Although the process is new, described in a paper in the journal Natural Communication, will allow the study of concepts like quantum physics, the researchers say there are practical applications as well, such as using them for precision accelerometers and electric field sensors.
Unfortunately, there’s no word on whether the team even managed to come up with small glow sticks.
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