Scientists create ‘MRI’ tool to image atoms million times smaller than hair

A collaborative effort between researchers at the Center for Quantum Nanoscience (QNS) in South Korea and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany has led to the development of an MRI-like tool for quantum materials.

Like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) produces high-resolution images of specific human body parts, this quantum sensor can provide details about attributes such as an electron’s spin or quantum entanglement.

Atoms are the basic unit of matter, but our interest has gone far beyond basic structures into the quantum realm. To unlock the potential of technologies like quantum computing, scientists are keen to understand electric and magnetic fields inside atoms.

With atomic sizes a million times smaller than a human hair, tools to make these measurements also need to be small enough. Quantum sensors have been attempted multiple times before. While they can measure electric or magnetic fields generated inside the atom, their resolution has been below satisfactory.

Teaming up abilities

Previous attempts at designing a quantum-scale sensor relied on the ability to detect a defect in the crystal lattice. Since these defects are deeply embedded inside the material being used to develop the sensor, its ability to measure the electric and magnetic fields is always a fair distance away from the atoms being probed.

The research collaboration between teams at QNS and  Forschungszentrum Jülich turned to a single-molecule approach to sense electric and magnetic fields from a much closer distance. The Jülich group contributed expertise in single-molecule fabrication, while the QNS team contributed instrumentation and methodological know-how.

The tool developed by the researchers consists of a molecule attached to the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope , allowing the team to probe atoms from an extremely close distance.

High-resolution sensing

“This quantum sensor is a game changer because it provides images of materials as rich as an MRI and at the same time sets a new standard for spatial resolution in quantum sensors,” said Taner Esat, a researcher at Forschungszentrum Jülich, who conceived the idea of the sensor. “This will allow us to explore and understand materials at their most fundamental level.”

When tested, the researchers found that their tool could detect electric and magnetic fields with a spatial resolution of a tenth of an angstrom, where the angstrom is the diameter of an atom and is equivalent to ten billionths of a meter when considering metric units.

“What makes this achievement so striking is that we use an exquisitely engineered quantum object to resolve fundamental atomic properties from the bottom up,” added Dimitry Borodin, a postdoctoral researcher at QNS, who was also involved in the research. “Preceding techniques for visualizing materials use large, bulky probes to try to analyze tiny atomic features. You have to be small to see small.”

Another exciting achievement of this technology is that it can be constructed and used in laboratories worldwide without hassle. So, quantum researchers around the world will benefit from this development right away. The technology could open up new avenues in material science and improve our understanding of the quantum realm .

“It is exciting to see how our long-standing work in molecular manipulation has resulted in the construction of a record-holding quantum device,” added Ruslan Temirov, a professor at  Forschungszentrum Jülich, in the press release.

The research findings were published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology .