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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

It's one of the purest and most versatile materials in the world, with uses in everything from jewelry to industrial abrasives to quantum science. But a group of Harvard scientists has uncovered a new use for diamonds: tracking neural signals in the brain [phys.org].

Using atomic-scale quantum defects in diamonds known as nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers to detect the magnetic field generated by neural signals, scientists working in the lab of Ronald Walsworth, a faculty member in Harvard's Center for Brain Science and Physics Department, demonstrated a noninvasive technique that can image the activity of neurons.

The work was described in a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and was performed in collaboration with Harvard faculty members Mikhail (Misha) Lukin and Hongkun Park.

"The idea of using NV centers for sensing neuron magnetic fields began with the initial work of Ron Walsworth and Misha Lukin about 10 years ago, but for a long time our back-of-the-envelope calculations made it seem that the fields would be too small to detect, and the technology wasn't there yet," said Jennifer Schloss, a Ph.D. student and co-author of the study.

"This paper is really the first step to show that measuring magnetic fields from individual neurons can be done in a scalable way," said Ph.D. student and fellow co-author Matthew Turner. "We wanted to be able to model the signal characteristics, and say, based on theory, 'This is what we expect to see.' Our experimental results were consistent with these expectations. This predictive ability is important for understanding more complicated neuronal networks."

Quantum sensors I put in my own head, cool. Quantum sensors other people put in my head, not cool.

Original Submission