Abstract
The relationship between the unique characteristics of nanodiamonds (NDs) and the fluorescence properties of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers has lead to a tool with quantum sensing capabilities and nanometric spatial resolution; this tool is able to operate in a wide range of temperatures and pressures and in harsh chemical conditions. For the development of devices based on NDs, a great effort has been invested in researching cheap and easily scalable synthesis techniques for NDs and NV-NDs. In this review, we discuss the common fluorescent NDs synthesis techniques as well as the laser-assisted production methods. Then, we report recent results regarding the applications of fluorescent NDs, focusing in particular on sensing of the environmental parameters as well as in catalysis. Finally, we underline that the highly non-equilibrium processes occurring in the interactions of laser-materials in controlled laboratory conditions for NDs synthesis present unique opportunities for investigation of the phenomena occurring under extreme thermodynamic conditions in planetary cores or under warm dense matter conditions.
Highlights
Nanodiamonds are diamond nanoparticles; they have most of the unique properties of bulk diamond but at a nanoscale
Environmental, mechanical stress acts as a strain field on the fluorescent pulsed laser ablation (PLA) NDs that can be detected via optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) as an additional source of the ODMR fluorescence dip splitting
We demonstrated in [64] that such a field is well explained by taking into account the spin-Hamiltonian of the NV center with the added of a potential term, Vgs, which accounts for the interaction of the NV center with the local strain field e
Summary
Nanodiamonds are diamond nanoparticles; they have most of the unique properties of bulk diamond but at a nanoscale. This, combined with the possibility of accurately manipulating the population of spin levels in the ground state, has allowed NV centers to be used as quantum sensors of environmental physical parameters with nanoscale precision, such as for magnetic [9] or electric fields [10], temperature [11] (from cryogenic to well above 300 K), pressure, as well as in harsh chemical environments. These sensors can be used in biological material given NDs’. The study of these specific conditions is more difficult when using traditional techniques
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