Nuclear
Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) have been
involved in almost all facets of science ranging from discovering unknowns
within samples to expanding our knowledge of the human body.
Although grand,
these instruments have their limitations and it is through nitrogen-vacancy
(NV) centers that these limitations will be abolished.
The primary scale in which science can scan at the moment only reaches down to
the micrometer and to go any further involves a large amount of money and time
or specific subzero temperatures2.
NV centers are able to circumvent
the current expensive and temperature locked methods by not requiring external
magnetic fields and using synthetic diamonds that can gather information at ambient
temperatures1. NV centers are defects found within diamonds which
have been proven to detect proton nuclear spins in samples within a volume of 5
cubic nanometers. When the sample, atop the diamond detector, is subjected to
radio waves there is a fluorescent response measuring excitation and relaxation
spins of the protons within the sample that is transformed into interpretable
data by computers3.
Although
different from standard NMR and MRI instrumentation the use of magnetic
resonance is the same. Imaging produced through the use of NV centers is still
in the works as MRI is a form of NMR so too will its advance come once NMR is
mastered under these new conditions.
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