Thaindian News

Washington, Sep 23 (IANS) Diamonds, a woman’s best friend, might also turn out to be the patient’s good friend as well.
Work done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on quantum computing, it appears, has more immediate application in medical science.

NIST theoretical physicist Jacob Taylor envisions diamond-tipped sensors performing magnetic resonance tests on individual cells within the body, or on single molecules drug companies want to investigate - a sort of MRI scanner for the microscopic.

Their finding that a candidate “quantum bit” has great sensitivity to magnetic fields hints that MRI-like devices to probe individual drug molecules and living cells may be possible.

The candidate system, formed from a nitrogen atom lodged within a diamond crystal, is promising not only because it can sense atomic-scale variations in magnetism, but also because it functions at room temperature.

Diamond, which is solidified carbon, occasionally has minute imperfections within its crystalline structure. A common impurity is a “nitrogen vacancy,” in which two carbon atoms are replaced by a single atom of nitrogen, leaving the other carbon atom’s space vacant.

Nitrogen vacancies are in part responsible for diamond’s famed lustre, for they are actually fluorescent: when green light strikes them, the nitrogen atom’s two excitable unpaired electrons glow a brilliant red.

The team can use slight variations in this fluorescence to determine the magnetic spin of a single electron in the nitrogen.

Spin is a quantum property that has a value of either “up” or “down,” and therefore could represent one or zero in binary computation.

Reading a quantum bit’s spin information - a fundamental task for a quantum computer -has been a daunting challenge, says an NIST release.

But the NIST team demonstrated that by transferring the information back and forth between the electron and the nuclei, the information could be amplified, making it much easier to read.