Coupling a Single Nitrogen-Vacancy Center in Nanodiamond to Superparamagnetic Nanoparticles

Single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect centers in diamond have been exploited as single photon sources and spin qubits due to their room-temperature robust quantum light emission and long electron spin coherence times. They were coupled to a manifold of structures, such as optical cavities, plasmonic waveguides, and even injected into living cells to study fundamental interactions of various nature at the nanoscale. Of particular interest are applications of NVs as quantum sensors for local nanomagnetometry. Here, we employ a nanomanipulation approach to couple a single NV center in a nanodiamond to a single few-nm superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticle in a controlled way. After measuring via relaxometry the magnetic particle spin-noise, we take advantage of the crystal strain m(s) = ± 1 spin level separation to detect the superparamagnetic particle’s effect in presence of a driving AC magnetic field. Our experiments provide detailed insight in the behavior of such particles with respect to high frequency fields. The approach can be extended to the investigation of increasingly complex, but controlled nanomagnetic hybrid particle assemblies. Moreover, our results suggest that superparamagnetic nanoparticles can amplify local magnetic interactions in order to improve the sensitivity of diamond nanosensors for specific measurement scenarios.