Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI, is typically used in a medical setting. However, as a research team at Harvard University led by Hongkun Park and Mikhail Lukin found, MRI can have additional applications in the realm of physical chemistry. It is known that when a nitrogen atom is substituted for a carbon in a diamond lattice, it creates a “hole” that acts as a particularly sensitive magnetometer. These holes are called nitrogen vacancy centers. Using these holes and magnetic resonance imaging, the team at Harvard was able to determine the spin states of a single neutron within an atom. Additionally, they were able to detect individual protons on the surface of the diamond. This represents the limit of what MRI technology is capable of at the present time. In the future, they hope to expand on what they have accomplished so far and map molecules sitting on the surface of a diamond molecule in the nitrogen vacancy center. Going even further, they hope to map positions of individual atoms within small molecules that have spins, which this technique can accurately detect and locate.
Submitted by Andrew Delahunty
I thought this article was very interesting because I didn't know that MRI's were used in other areas besides in medical hospitals. Chemistry has proven great use of these MRI's through finding spins of neurons and eventually finding individual atoms on a diamond for example. Technology right now is so advanced, it is amazing that we can detect a single proton on the surface of a diamond but also how much we can't detect yet. I wonder how long it will take for technology to advance like it has in the past ten years. Hopefully we will be able to detect single atoms in ten years.
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