A new imaging technique using quantum science could lead to new drug therapies and new treatment options, according to a recent study.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo and supported by Transformative Quantum Technologies have demonstrated the feasibility of nuclear magnetic resonance diffraction (dNMR) to study the lattice structure of crystalline solids at the atomic scale, a feat that had not been possible only for larger scale imaging applications like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
“dNMR was proposed in 1973 as a method to study the structure of materials,” said Dr Holger Haas, one of the study’s lead authors and alumnus of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) in Waterloo. , now at IBM. “At the time, the authors dismissed their idea as ridiculous. Our work comes very close to realizing their crazy idea – we have shown that it is possible to study structures on the atomic length scale on sample volumes relevant to many biological organisms and physical systems.”
“dNMR opens up a tremendous variety of capabilities in many research directions, including the study of nanocrystals and organic compounds,” Haas added. The ability to image biological structures, such as protein molecules and virus particles, at the atomic scale can advance understanding of their function and potentially lead to new drug therapies and treatment options.
dNMR works by exploiting a property of nuclei called spin, a fundamental unit of magnetism. When placed in a magnetic field, the nuclei essentially act like magnets due to this spin. A time-varying magnetic field can perturb the spins, changing the angle of the spin – in technical terms this is called encoding a phase in each spin. At a particular encoding time, all spins will point to the original direction. When this happens, a diffraction echo is observed, a signal that can be measured to find the lattice constant and shape of the sample. Each nucleus will produce a unique signal, which can be used to discern the structure of the molecule.
The challenge in performing atomic-scale NMR was the difficulty of encoding large relative phase differences between neighboring nuclear spins at the atomic scale, which meant that a diffraction echo could not be observed. The researchers overcame this limitation by using quantum control techniques and generating large time-dependent magnetic field gradients. With this, they could encode and detect atomic-scale modulation in an array of two million spins and measure the displacement of the spin array in a sample with subatomic precision.
This research represents substantial progress in establishing atomic-scale NMR as a tool for studying the structure of materials.
Sahand Tabatabaei, co-leader of the study and Ph.D. student at IQC and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Waterloo, adds: “Now that we are on the verge of being able to do dNMR on a network at the atomic length scale, we can also really begin to study more fundamental quantum physics, such as quantum transport phenomena and quantum many-body physics, at the atomic length scale, which does not has never been done before on samples of this size.”
The study, “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Diffraction with subangström precision,” appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A 2D network of electron and nuclear spin qubits opens a new frontier in quantum science
Holger Haas et al, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Diffraction with Sub-Angstrom Accuracy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2209213119
Provided by the National Academy of Sciences
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