Burning and graphitization of optically levitated nanodiamonds in vacuum
arXiv:1510.07555 · doi:10.1038/srep21633
Abstract
A nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in a nanodiamond, levitated in high vacuum, has recently been proposed as a probe for demonstrating mesoscopic center-of-mass superpositions \cite{Scala2013, Zhang2013} and for testing quantum gravity \cite{Albrecht2014}. Here, we study the behavior of optically levitated nanodiamonds containing NV centers at sub-atmospheric pressures and show that while they burn in air, this can be prevented by replacing the air with nitrogen. However, in nitrogen the nanodiamonds graphitize below mB. Exploiting the Brownian motion of a levitated nanodiamond, we extract its internal temperature () and find that it would be detrimental to the NV center's spin coherence time \cite{Toyli2012}. These values of make it clear that the diamond is not melting, contradicting a recent suggestion \cite{Neukirch2015}. Additionally, using the measured damping rate of a levitated nanoparticle at a given pressure, we propose a new way of determining its size.
Six pages and four figures
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Cited by in corpus (35)
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