Nuclear Surface Acoustic Resonance with Spin-Rotation Coupling

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to detect nuclear spin resonance in thin specimens using surface acoustic waves and spin-rotation coupling, enabling high sensitivity detection of nuclear spins in atomically-thin materials.

Contribution

It introduces a novel technique combining surface acoustic wave cavities with spin-rotation coupling for nuclear spin resonance detection in ultra-thin samples.

Findings

High quality factor SAW cavity enhances signal detection.

Potential to detect nuclear spins in single atomic layers.

Estimated high signal-to-noise ratio for the proposed method.

Abstract

We show that, under an appropriate out-of-plane static magnetic field, nuclear spins in a thin specimen on a surface acoustic wave (SAW) cavity can be resonantly excited and detected through spin-rotation coupling. Since such a SAW cavity can have the quality factor as high as $10^{4}$ and the mode volume as small as $10^{-2}$ mm$^{3}$ the signal-to-noise ratio in detecting the resonance is estimated to be quite high. We argue that detecting nuclear spin resonance of a single flake of an atomically-thin layer of two-dimensional semiconductor, which has so far been beyond hope with the conventional inductive method, can be a realistic target with the proposed scheme.