Diffusion broadening of spectral lines is the main limitation to frequency resolution in non-polarized liquid state nano-NMR. This problem arises from the limited amount of information that can be extracted from the signal before losing coherence. For liquid state NMR as with most generic sensing experiments, the signal is thought to decay exponentially, severely limiting resolution. However, there is theoretical evidence that predicts a power law decay of the signal’s correlations due to diffusion noise in the non-polarized nano-NMR scenario. In this work we show that in the NV based nano-NMR setup such diffusion noise results in high spectral resolution.

The ultimate precision limit in estimating the Larmor frequency of N unentangled qubits is well established, and is highly important for magnetometers, gyroscopes, and other types of quantum sensors. However, this limit assumes perfect projective measurements of the quantum registers. This requirement is not practical in many physical systems, such as NMR spectroscopy, where a weakly interacting external probe is used as a measurement device. Here, we show that in the framework of quantum nano-NMR spectroscopy, in which these limitations are inherent, the ultimate precision limit is still achievable using control and a finely tuned measurement.

The NV-NMR spectrometer is a promising candidate for detection of NMR signals at the nanoscale. Field inhomogeneities, however, are a major source of noise that limits spectral resolution in state of the art NV-NMR experiments and constitutes a major bottleneck in the development of nanoscale NMR. Here we propose, a route in which this limitation could be circumvented in NV-NMR spectrometer experiments, by utilizing the nanometric scale and the quantumness of the detector.

We propose a scheme for sensing of an oscillating field in systems with large inhomogeneous broadening and driving field variation by applying sequences of phased, adiabatic, chirped pulses. These act as a double filter for dynamical decoupling, where the adiabatic changes of the mixing angle during the pulses rectify the signal and partially remove frequency noise. The sudden changes between the pulses act as instantaneous π pulses in the adiabatic basis for additional noise suppression. We also use the pulses' phases to correct for other errors, e.g., due to nonadiabatic couplings. Our technique improves significantly the coherence time in comparison to standard XY8 dynamical decoupling in realistic simulations in NV centers with large inhomogeneous broadening. Beyond the theoretical proposal, we also present proof-of-principle experimental results for quantum sensing of an oscillating field in NV centers in diamond, demonstrating superior performance compared to the standard technique.

Nano nuclear magnetic resonance (nano‐NMR) spectroscopy with nitrogen‐vacancy (NV) centers holds the potential to provide high‐resolution spectra of minute samples. This is likely to have important implications for chemistry, medicine, and pharmaceutical engineering. One of the main hurdles facing the technology is that diffusion of unpolarized liquid samples broadens the spectral lines thus limiting resolution. Experiments in the field are therefore impeded by the efforts involved in achieving high polarization of the sample which is a challenging endeavor. Here, a scenario where the liquid is confined to a small volume is examined. It is shown that the confinement “counteracts” the effect of diffusion, thus overcoming a major obstacle to the resolving abilities of the NV‐NMR spectrometer.

Because of its superior coherent and optical properties at room temperature, the nitrogen-vacancy (N-V) center in diamond has become a promising quantum probe for nanoscale quantum sensing. However, the application of N-V-containing nanodiamonds to quantum sensing suffers from their relatively short spin coherence times. Here we demonstrate energy-efficient protection of N-V spin coherence in nanodiamonds using concatenated continuous dynamical decoupling, which exhibits excellent performance with a less-stringent microwave-power requirement. When this is applied to nanodiamonds in living cells, we are able to extend the spin coherence time by an order of magnitude to the T1 limit of 30μs. Further analysis demonstrates concomitant improvements of sensing performance, which shows that our results provide an important step toward in vivo quantum sensing using N-V centers in nanodiamond.

Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centers in diamonds have been shown in recent years to be excellent magnetometers on the nanoscale. One of the recent applications of the quantum sensor is retrieving the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrum of a minute sample, whose net polarization is well below the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of classic devices. The information in the magnetic noise of diffusing particles has also been shown in decoherence spectroscopy approaches to provide a method for measuring different physical parameters. Similar noise is induced on the NV center by a flowing liquid. However, when the noise created by diffusion effects is more dominant than the noise of the drift, it is unclear whether the velocity can be efficiently estimated. Here we propose a non-intrusive setup for measuring the drift velocity near the surface of a flow channel based on magnetic field quantum sensing using NV centers. We provide a detailed analysis of the sensitivity for different measurement protocols, and we show that our nanoscale velocimetry scheme outperforms current fluorescence based approaches even when diffusion noise is dominant. Our scheme can be applied for the investigation of microfluidic channels, where the drift velocity is usually low and the flow properties are currently unclear. A better understanding of these properties is essential for the future development of microfluidic and nanofluidic infrastructures.