Microcontroller-based magnetometer using a single nitrogen-vacancy defect in a nanodiamond
Abstract
The measurement of magnetic properties of various physical systems with nanometric spatial resolution raises in-terest in areas as materials science, biotechnology and information storage and processing. In the present work amicrocontroller-based magnetometer was built using a single nitrogen-vacancy defect in a nanodiamond. The imple-mented nanomagnetometry method is simple and relies on the frequency modulation of the nitrogen-vacancy defectelectron spin resonance using square pulses of an externally applied magnetic field and employs a single microwavesource. The developed system has a reasonable sensitivity of 4\(μ\)T/√Hz and is able to measure magnetic field varia-tions in time around 4 mT/s. This system was used for nanoimaging the inhomogeneous spatial magnetic field profileof a magnetized steel microwire, and a spatial magnetic field gradient of 13\(μ\)T/ 63 nm was measured. Besides itsusefulness for nanoscale imaging of magnetic fields, the present work can be of interest in the development of compactnanodiamond based magnetometers.