Nitrogen vacancy centers can be spin-polarized and made to fluoresce (IMAGE)

University of California - Berkeley

Nitrogen vacancy centers can be spin-polarized and made to fluoresce

Caption

The crystal lattice of a microdiamond contains gaps -- nitrogen vacancies -- that can be polarized (red spinning balls) and made to emit red light when illuminated by a laser. The polarized centers then hyperpolarize nearby carbon-13 atoms (blue balls), allowing them to be detected by NMR imaging. This allows the tracers to be imaged both by optical fluorescence microscopy and NMR, providing higher resolution pictures deeper inside tissue.

Credit

UC Berkeley graphic by Xudong Lv and Mustafa Kamran

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