Tweezers Enable Dynamic Control of Single Nanoscale Quantum Objects

Led by Justus Ndukaife, assistant professor of electrical engineering, Vanderbilt researchers have introduced an approach for trapping and moving a single colloidal nanodiamond with nitrogen-vacancy center using a low-power laser beam. The width of a single human hair is approximately 90,000 nm; nanodiamonds are less than 100 nm. These carbon-based materials are one of the few that can release a single photon, considered a building block for future quantum photonics applications, Ndukaife said. It is currently possible to trap nanodiamonds using light fields focused near nano-size metallic surfaces, but it is not possible to move them that way; laser beam spots are simply too big. Using an atomic force microscope, it takes scientists...