Color center based quantum sensing for biomedical sensing

Nitrogen-vacancy centres hosted in diamonds are emerging as a promising modality for biological sensing due to their photostability and sensitive, multi-modal sensing capabilities. Although biological sensing in laboratory, optical bench-style set-ups have been repeatedly shown, outstanding challenges remain in transitioning to reproducible, commercial diamond-NV biosensing products. This internship will focus on developing reliable fabrication techniques of diamond-NV nanophotonic structures for use in biosensing.

Utilising their world-leading cleanroom facilities, imec have already successfully constructed nanophotonic structures consisting of silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits on a silicon wafer substrate capable of exciting NV defects and collecting their fluorescence. During the internship, techniques developed at imec will be used to integrate a thin diamond-NV layer on top of this nanophotonic device. These will be suitable for integration with industrial manufacturing to ensure commercial viability of the resulting device. Here, my own experience of quantum biosensing from my PhD will hep inform the best properties of the device for successful biosensing. The optimization will be achieved by utilising an integrated MW line along with the integrated NV excitation-emission photonics to experimentally test the performance of the device with different NV sensing protocols. The resulting integrated photonic device will provide a platform capable of quantum-based biosensing.