Lightly Boron-Doped Nanodiamonds for Quantum Sensing Applications

Masfer Alkahtani; Dmitrii K Zharkov; Andrey V Leontyev; Artemi G Shmelev; Victor G Nikiforov; Philip R Hemmer

doi:10.3390/nano12040601

Lightly Boron-Doped Nanodiamonds for Quantum Sensing Applications

Nanomaterials (Basel). 2022 Feb 10;12(4):601. doi: 10.3390/nano12040601.

Authors

Masfer Alkahtani^{1

2}, Dmitrii K Zharkov³, Andrey V Leontyev³, Artemi G Shmelev³, Victor G Nikiforov³, Philip R Hemmer^{2

3

4}

Affiliations

¹ King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Riyadh 11442, Saudi Arabia.
² Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.
³ FRC Kazan Scientific Center of RAS, Zavoisky Physical-Technical Institute, 420029 Kazan, Russia.
⁴ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.

Abstract

Unlike standard nanodiamonds (NDs), boron-doped nanodiamonds (BNDs) have shown great potential in heating a local environment, such as tumor cells, when excited with NIR lasers (808 nm). This advantage makes BNDs of special interest for hyperthermia and thermoablation therapy. In this study, we demonstrate that the negatively charged color center (NV) in lightly boron-doped nanodiamonds (BNDs) can optically sense small temperature changes when heated with an 800 nm laser even though the correct charge state of the NV is not expected to be as stable in a boron-doped diamond. The reported BNDs can sense temperature changes over the biological temperature range with a sensitivity reaching 250 mK/√Hz. These results suggest that BNDs are promising dual-function bio-probes in hyperthermia or thermoablation therapy as well as other quantum sensing applications, including magnetic sensing.

Keywords: boron-doped nanodiamonds; diamonds; nitrogen-vacancy; quantum sensing.