New opportunities in condensed matter physics for nanoscale quantum sensors

TL;DR

This paper reviews how nitrogen vacancy centre quantum sensors enable nanoscale, noninvasive, and high-precision measurements of magnetic and electrical phenomena in condensed matter systems, revealing new insights beyond traditional techniques.

Contribution

It summarizes recent advances and technical frontiers in using NV centre sensors for probing complex condensed matter phenomena at the nanoscale.

Findings

NV centres can measure static and dynamic magnetic fields with high spatial resolution.

They enable access to correlation functions and order parameters in condensed matter.

Recent techniques have expanded the range of systems studied, including metals, graphene, and magnetic materials.

Abstract

Nitrogen vacancy (NV) centre quantum sensors provide unique opportunities in studying condensed matter systems: they are quantitative, noninvasive, physically robust, offer nanoscale resolution, and may be used across a wide range of temperatures. These properties have been exploited in recent years to obtain nanoscale resolution measurements of static magnetic fields arising from spin order and current flow in condensed matter systems. Compared with other nanoscale magnetic-field sensors, NV centres have the unique advantage that they can probe quantities that go beyond average magnetic fields. Leveraging techniques from magnetic resonance, NV centres can perform high precision noise sensing, and have given access to diverse systems, such as fluctuating electrical currents in simple metals and graphene, as well as magnetic dynamics in yttrium iron garnet. In this review we summarise unique opportunities in condensed matter sensing by focusing on the connections between specific NV measurements and previously established physical characteristics that are more readily understood in the condensed matter community, such as correlation functions and order parameters that are inaccessible by other techniques, and we describe the technical frontier enabled by NV centre sensing.