ECE professor has paper published in prestigious publication
Dr. Phillip Hemmer and several co-authors recently had their paper accepted for advanced online publication on the prestigious research publication, “Nature’s Materials.”
The paper titled "Ultralong Spin Coherence Time in Isotopically Engineered Diamond" can be found at http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v8/n5/full/nmat2420.html.
“Basically we found that by using highly pure diamond, including isotopically pure 12C, we could improve the already high magnetic sensitivity of the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center by factors between 10 and 100 depending on the signal bandwidth,” Hemmer said. “This means that NV diamond, even operating at room temperature, now has the chance to outperform all other magnetometers such as atomic vapors and SQUIDs.
“Of course there are many medical and security related applications of magnetometers, like MEG and MCG for medical applications, or abnormality detection for security applications, so this is potentially a major technology breakthrough for a number of fields.”
Hemmer said the paper has been creating a lot of interest because of this.
The full listing of authors and their affiliations for this paper is as follows: Gopalakrishnan Balasubramanian, Philipp Neumann, Daniel Twitchen, Matthew Markham, Roman Kolesov, Norikazu Mizuoschi, Junichi Isoya, Jocelyn Achard, Johannes Beck, Julia Tissler, Vincent Jacques, Philip R. Hemmer, Fedor Jelezko and Jörg Wrachtrup.
Hemmer, a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at Texas A&M University, joined the department in January 2002. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Dayton in 1976 and his Ph.D. in Physics from MIT in 1984. His interest areas are in solid materials for quantum optics, especially “dark resonance” excitation, materials and techniques for resonant nonlinear optics, phase-conjugate-based turbulence aberration and compensation, spectral holeburning materials and techniques for ultra-dense memories and high temperature operation, quantum computing in solid materials, quantum communication and teleportation in trapped atoms, holographic optical memory materials, smart pixels devices, optical correlators, photorefractive applications, atomic clocks and laser trapping and cooling.
Other honors include receiving the Ruth and William Neely ‘52/Dow Chemical Fellowship, an outstanding faculty award from the department, an NSF Fellowship, the Air Force Research Laboratory Chief Scientist’s award and the AFOSR Star Team Award three times. He also is a member of the Optical Society of America, S.P.I.E. and American Physical Society.
Nature Materials is a monthly multi-disciplinary journal aimed at bringing together cutting-edge research across the entire spectrum of materials science and engineering. Materials research is a diverse and fast-growing discipline, which has moved from a largely applied, engineering focus to a position where it has an increasing impact on other classical disciplines such as physics, chemistry and biology. Nature Materials covers all applied and fundamental aspects of the synthesis/processing, structure/composition, properties and performance of materials, where "materials" are identified as substances in the condensed states (liquid, solid, colloidal) designed or manipulated for technological ends.
The 2007 ISI impact factor for Nature Materials is 19.782, according to the ISI Journal Citation Reports. This places Nature Materials not only as the leading primary research journal in materials science but also across all related physical sciences.