Somewhere in the quantum realm, a teeny, tiny rave is afoot. Researchers created ultra-small levitating diamonds, with diameters the size of 350 strands of human DNA, that reflect light like a disco ball as they spin over a billion times per minute. The itty bitty party decorations are the creation of Purdue University scientists, who are using them to make super-precise measurements that could help illuminate the relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity.
There have been previous efforts to levitate nanodiamonds, but actually getting it to work requires incredibly exact conditions. “In the past, experiments with these floating diamonds had trouble in preventing their loss in vacuum and reading out the spin qubits,” said Tongcang Li, a physics and astronomy professor at Purdue, in a statement . “However, in our work, we successfully levitated a diamond in a high vacuum using a special ion trap.
For the first time, we could observe and control the behavior of the spin qubits inside the levitated diamond in high vacuum.” Qubits, the quantum versions of computer bits, are the fundamental unit of quantum information, where semiconducting material is used to trap individual electron charges and their associated spin. To create the conditions necessary to study how the diamond’s rotation affected the spin qubits, the researchers had to spin the diamond at the dizzying speed of 1.
2 billion rotations per minute. They were able to do this by creating a sapphire wafe.