Combine a garden-variety green laser, microwaves with roughly the energy of your wi-fi, and some diamond dust in drops of water, and what do you get? A precise chemical detection tool.
For the first time, researchers have combined nanodiamonds in microdroplets of liquid for quantum sensing. The new technique is precise, fast, sensitive, and requires only small amounts of the material to be studied – helpful when studying trace chemicals or individual cells. The results were published in the journal Science Advances in December.
With further development, there are many potential ways to use the nanodiamonds in droplets.
The new approach could be useful for creating self-driving bioreactors of the future. Bioreactors create controlled environments for growing microorganisms that can make medicines, biofuels, or food ingredients. Because each droplet of nanodiamonds can act as a microscopic “beaker” and can hold a single cell, researchers could potentially use the technique to tune bioreactors.
“You can envision setting up bioreactors in austere environments around the world or in space, to make things like food that you couldn’t deliver on a daily basis,” said Deepti Tanjore, director of the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit at Berkeley Lab. “Having precise quantum sensors that tell you how the microorganism culture is behaving is an important step toward that dream. To build a self-regulating bioreactor, we need that real-time intracellular data.”
