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Gavin Morley

Publications and source records attributed to Gavin Morley.

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A portable LED-based diamond magnetometer for outreach and teaching labs

We present a compact, low-cost version of an NV center diamond magnetometer which replaces the standard green laser with a high-power LED. This modification improves safety, reduces cost, and allows the green excitation and red photoluminescence to be viewed directly during demonstrations. The device is simple to assemble and suitable for outreach activities and undergraduate laboratories. We show that it can produce ODMR spectra and respond to nearby magnetic objects, with a sensitivity on the order of 1 $\mu$T/$\sqrt{\text{Hz}}$. Supplementary material provides details of the construction and suggestions for student investigations to support use in teaching laboratories.

physics.ed-ph

Limits on inference of gravitational entanglement

Combining gravity with quantum mechanics remains one of the biggest challenges of physics. In the past years, experiments with opto-mechanical systems have been proposed that may give indirect clues about the quantum nature of gravity. In a recent variation of such tests [D. Carney et al., Phys.Rev.X Quantum 2, 030330 (2021)], the authors propose to gravitationally entangle an atom interferometer with a mesoscopic oscillator. The interaction results in periodic drops and revivals of the interferometeric visibility, which under specific assumptions indicate the gravitational generation of entanglement. Here we study semi-classical models of the atom interferometer that can reproduce the same effect. We show that the core signature -- periodic collapses and revivals of the visibility -- can appear if the atom is subject to a random unitary channel, including the case where the oscillator is fully classical and situations even without explicit modelling of the oscillator. We also show that the non-classicality of the oscillator vanishes unless the system is very close to its ground state, and even when the system is in the ground state, the non-classicality is limited by the coupling strength. Our results thus indicate that deducing entanglement from the proposed experiment is very challenging, since fulfilling and verifying the non-classicality assumptions is a significant challenge on its own right.

quant-ph

Production of Metal-free Diamond Nanoparticles

In this paper, the controlled production of high quality metal-free diamond nanoparticles is demonstrated. Milling with tempered steel is shown to leave behind iron oxide contamination which is difficult to remove. Milling with SiN alleviates this issue but generates more non diamond carbon. Thus the choice of milling materials is critically determined by the acceptable contaminants in the ultimate application. The removal of metal impurities, present in all commercially available nanoparticles, will open new possibilities towards the production of customised diamond nanoparticles, covering the most demanding quantum applications.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci