Angstrom-resolution magnetic resonance imaging of single molecules via wavefunction fingerprints of nuclear spins

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.

44 pages, 6 figures,1 table

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Cited by in corpus (18)

• Quantum many-body theory for electron spin decoherence in nanoscale nuclear spin baths
• Environmental noise spectroscopy with qubits subjected to dynamical decoupling
• High-resolution spectroscopy of single nuclear spins via sequential weak measurements
• Single-Shot Readout of a Nuclear Spin Weakly Coupled to a Nitrogen-Vacancy Center
• Soft Quantum Control for Highly Selective Interactions among Joint Quantum Systems
• Delayed entanglement echo for individual control of a large number of nuclear spins
• Proposal for enhanced resolution in nanoscale NMR: quantum sensing with pulses of finite duration
• The non-vanishing effect of detuning errors in dynamical decoupling based quantum sensing experiments
• Proposal for Quantum Sensing Based on Two-Dimensional Dynamical Decoupling: NMR Correlation Spectroscopy of Single Molecules
• Noise-resilient architecture of a hybrid electron-nuclear quantum register in diamond
• Sequential generalized measurements: Asymptotics, typicality and emergent projective measurements
• Quantifying the performance of multi-pulse quantum sensing
• Theory of Metastability in Discrete-Time Open Quantum Dynamics
• Improving quantum parameter estimation by monitoring quantum trajectories
• Localization of a magnetic moment using a two-qubit probe
• How coherence measurements of a qubit steer its quantum environment
• The Transition from Quantum to Classical in weak measurements and reconstruction of Quantum Correlation
• Channel-based framework for phase esimation of multiple eigenvalues