Two proof-of-principle experiments towards T1-limited magnetic resonance imaging with NV centers in diamond are demonstrated. First, a large number of Rabi oscillations is measured and it is demonstrated that the hyperfine interaction due to the NVs 14N can be extracted from the beating oscillations. Second, the Rabi beats under V-type microwave excitation of the three hyperfine manifolds is studied experimentally and described theoretically.
The use of entangled states was shown to improve the fundamental limits of spectroscopy to beyond the standard-quantum limit. In these Heisenberg-limited protocols the phase between two states in an entangled superposition evolves N-fold faster than in the uncorrelated case, where N for example can be the number of entangled atoms in a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state. Here we propose and demonstrate the use of correlated spin-Hamiltonians for the realization of Heisenberg-limited Rabi-type spectroscopy. Rather than probing the free evolution of the phase of an entangled state with respect to a local oscillator (LO), we probe the evolution of an, initially separable, two-atom register under an Ising spin-Hamiltonian with a transverse field. The resulting correlated spin-rotation spectrum is twice as narrow as compared with uncorrelated rotation. We implement this Heisenberg-limited Rabi spectroscopy scheme on the optical-clock electric-quadrupole transition of $^{88}$Sr$^+$ using a two-ion crystal. We further show that depending on the initial state, correlated rotation can occur in two orthogonal sub-spaces of the full Hilbert space, yielding Heisenberg-limited spectroscopy of either the average transition frequency of the two ions or their difference from the mean frequency. The potential improvement of clock stability due to the use of entangled states depends on the details of the method used and the dominating decoherence mechanism. The use of correlated spin-rotations can therefore potentially lead to new paths for clock stability improvement.
Characterization of microstructures in live tissues is one of the keys to diagnosing early stages of pathology and understanding disease mechanisms. However, the extraction of reliable information on biomarkers based on microstructure details is still a challenge, as the size of features that can be resolved with non-invasive Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is orders of magnitude larger than the relevant structures. Here we derive from quantum information theory the ultimate precision limits for obtaining such details by MRI probing of water-molecule diffusion. We show that already available MRI pulse sequences can be optimized to attain the ultimate precision limits by choosing control parameters that are uniquely determined by the expected size, the diffusion coefficient and the spin relaxation time $T_{2}$. By attaining the ultimate precision limit per measurement, the number of measurements and the total acquisition time may be drastically reduced compared to the present state of the art. These results will therefore allow MRI to advance towards unravelling a wealth of diagnostic information.
Quantum control of individual spins in condensed matter systems is an emerging field with wide-ranging applications in spintronics, quantum computation, and sensitive magnetometry. Recent experiments have demonstrated the ability to address and manipulate single electron spins through either optical or electrical techniques. However, it is a challenge to extend individual spin control to nanoscale multi-electron systems, as individual spins are often irresolvable with existing methods. Here we demonstrate that coherent individual spin control can be achieved with few-nm resolution for proximal electron spins by performing single-spin magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is realized via a scanning magnetic field gradient that is both strong enough to achieve nanometric spatial resolution and sufficiently stable for coherent spin manipulations. We apply this scanning field-gradient MRI technique to electronic spins in nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond and achieve nanometric resolution in imaging, characterization, and manipulation of individual spins. For NV centers, our results in individual spin control demonstrate an improvement of nearly two orders of magnitude in spatial resolution compared to conventional optical diffraction-limited techniques. This scanning-field-gradient microscope enables a wide range of applications including materials characterization, spin entanglement, and nanoscale magnetometry.
Auxetics refers to structures or materials with a negative Poissons ratio, thereby capable of exhibiting counter-intuitive behaviors. Herein, auxetic structures are exploited to design mechanically tunable metamaterials in both planar and hemispherical configurations operating at megahertz (MHz) frequencies, optimized for their application to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Specially, the reported tunable metamaterials are composed of arrays of inter-jointed unit cells featuring metallic helices, enabling auxetic patterns with a negative Poissons ratio. The deployable deformation of the metamaterials yields an added degree of freedom with respect to frequency tunability through the resultant modification of the electromagnetic interactions between unit cells. The metamaterials are fabricated using 3D printing technology and a ~20 MHz frequency shift of the resonance mode is enabled during deformation. Experimental validation is performed in a clinical (3.0 Tesla) MRI, demonstrating that the metamaterials enable a marked boost in radiofrequency (RF) field strength under resonance matched conditions, ultimately yielding a dramatic increase in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) (~ 4.5X) of MRI. The tunable metamaterials presented herein offer a novel pathway towards the practical utilization of metamaterials in MRI, as well as a range of other emerging applications.
Purpose: To develop generic optimization strategies for image reconstruction using graphical processing units (GPUs) in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and to exemplarily report about our experience with a highly accelerated implementation of the non-linear inversion algorithm (NLINV) for dynamic MRI with high frame rates. Methods: The NLINV algorithm is optimized and ported to run on an a multi-GPU single-node server. The algorithm is mapped to multiple GPUs by decomposing the data domain along the channel dimension. Furthermore, the algorithm is decomposed along the temporal domain by relaxing a temporal regularization constraint, allowing the algorithm to work on multiple frames in parallel. Finally, an autotuning method is presented that is capable of combining different decomposition variants to achieve optimal algorithm performance in different imaging scenarios. Results: The algorithm is successfully ported to a multi-GPU system and allows online image reconstruction with high frame rates. Real-time reconstruction with low latency and frame rates up to 30 frames per second is demonstrated. Conclusion: Novel parallel decomposition methods are presented which are applicable to many iterative algorithms for dynamic MRI. Using these methods to parallelize the NLINV algorithm on multiple GPUs it is possible to achieve online image reconstruction with high frame rates.