International Exchange Award: Enhancing Nitrogen-Vacancy Centre Stability in Nanodiamonds Through Surface Modification

Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) images of Nanodiamonds (NDs) before and after coating with silica shells

Abbie Aleksandrova, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge was awarded an M4QN international exchange award to visit the Maurer Group at the University of Chicago. The visit took place from 18-25th March 2026.

Enhancing Nitrogen-Vacancy Centre Stability in Nanodiamonds Through Surface Modification

The aim of the visit was to learn a protocol for growing silica shells on the surface of nanodiamonds (NDs) with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres. This protocol has been shown by the Maurer lab to increase coherence times of NVs hosted in NDs and prevent zero field splitting (ZFS) drift in ODMR when NDs are put into complex environments. Having learnt this protocol from the Maurer lab, it will now be possible to replicate this work in Cambridge to use these core-shell NDs for sensing in complex environments such as intracellularly.

Benefits to the UK materials and quantum community

The lab visit has allowed Abbie to advance interdisciplinary research in the field of solid-state defects applied to bio-sensing. In addition, it has served to establish a stronger link between UK Q-BioMed hub and the University of Chicago’s NSF QuBBE, two hubs for biomedical applications of quantum technologies.

Visit Outcomes

Abbie writes “The lab visit will hopefully be the beginning of further collaboration in the future with our group in Cambridge preparing to send a sample of our bio-sensing chip to Chicago and a view of ongoing discussions between the groups from our shared research interests.”