Interesting article about sensors which use Quantum Mechanics

[HAL9000]

Summary of senor applications......

Though ghost imaging was predicted in the 1990s, arguments still rage about whether entanglement is playing a role or whether it works simply because light comes in discrete, countable photons. “There are plenty of physicists that don’t understand the distinction,” says Miles Padgett of the University of Glasgow, a quantum-imaging expert. “And I don’t think it matters. What matters is, are we using our knowledge in the quantum world to bring competitive advantage?” With hand-held detectors that can sense height differences down to a millimetre, magnetometers that can in principle watch your every neuron and imaging kit that can see across a smoky battlefield, the answer is ever more clearly yes.

Here, there and everywhere

Something I didn't know about was nitrogen vacancies, if you have a diamond and carefully remove nitrogen atoms then you have a very sensitive sensor. In the future it might be used as a qubit in a quantum computer.

Recent studies show that nitrogen vacancies can detect the on-and-off magnetic field of single nerve cells. The same principles can work inside the human body, too. Nanoscale diamonds with nitrogen vacancies have been used to spot chemical changes in living cells, and researchers from the Institute of Theoretical Physics and the Institute of Quantum Physics in Ulm, Germany, have formed NVision, a startup that uses such nanodiamonds to match the current best magnetically enhanced MRI techniques, but 40 times faster and at a quarter of the cost.

High performance in these applications depends on well-understood nitrogen vacancies, which occur sporadically in natural diamonds but whose positions and number must be known for precision measurement. Enter Element Six (a subsidiary of DeBeers, the world’s largest diamond producer), which manufactures diamonds with precision-engineered nitrogen vacancies.

 

[2hats]

One thing they missed is the use of superfluid shielded Bose-Einstein condensates in cold atom interferometers from which one can create ultraprecise gyroscopes for next generation inertial measurement units (with the potential to best current state-of-the-art fibre gyroscopes, with smaller packages, by up to ten orders of magnitude). These will open the door to incredibly accurate navigation and in domains where GNSS (GPS et al) can’t reach/operate effectively (eg underground, underwater, interplanetary space and beyond) - though they will both complement and augment GNSS and successors.