Gold-diamond duo takes temperature of single cell

• Autores: Katia Moskvitch
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2928, 2013, pág. 9
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Miniature diamonds more usually found in quantum computers, combined with fragments of gold, can be used to measure the temperature of individual cells. That could lead to a more accurate way to kill cancers while sparing healthy tissue--and a new way to explore cell behavior. So Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University and colleagues turned to nanodiamonds, which have defects in their structure that mean they sometimes contain extra electrons. The tendency of these electrons to exist in many states at once, a superposition, makes nanodiamonds promising as the bits, or qubits, of a quantum computer, where superposition enables multiple calculations in parallel. However, these states vary with temperature, which is troublesome for computing. They found they could detect temperature differences of just 0.0018°C inside the cell, a sensitivity record. And when they placed two diamonds in the cell, they could detect temperature variations between them, caused by their varying closeness to the gold. This should be possible even when the diamonds are just 200 nanometers apart. The team also used the set-up to heat a cell enough to kill it, and recorded a temperature upon death.