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Carlo Bradac

PhD student in Diamond Nanoscience

Why Diamond Nanoscience?
I started my PhD in Physics at Macquarie University in August 2008. My research is focussed on diamonds. Diamonds have been called “a girl’s best friend” but now, in the early 21st century, they are also going to be known as “a scientist’s best friend”. Despite its proverbial perfection, diamond in fact has hundreds of impurities with amazing properties. These impurities are what I study. The range of possible interests is wide and multifaceted, spanning from quantum computation technologies through to life sciences applications, and ultrasensitive sensoring devices. It seems diamond will become the leading material in achieving technological results that not so long ago would have been considered as belonging to the world of science fiction.

My Project
The impurities hosted by diamonds can act as single photon sources (a single photon is the smallest quantum of light) which one can consider to be the ideal fundamental building blocks of a quantum computer whose logic gates would be constituted by small bunches of atoms instead of “cumbersome” electrical circuits. Moreover single photons cannot be copied, cloned or reproduced, making single photon sources suitable for secure encrypted codes delivery. In life sciences, one can think of using diamond crystals of nanometric (a billionth of a meter) dimensions hosting fluorescing impurities as bio-markers. We could even explore the inside of single cells by tracking the light emitted by the defects hosted in such diamond nanocrystals, exploiting the fact that diamond is non-cytotoxic and so completely harmless for biological systems. Another interesting feasible application for impurities in diamonds is the detection and the measurement of electric or magnetic fields. The fluorescence of some diamond defects can be strongly affected by the presence of fields acting on them. This means that simply by looking at the characteristics of the light emitted by a defect we would be able to identify and measure the field it experiences. The main aim of my PhD project is to develop a magnetometer with nanoscale spatial resolution. The motivation is the fact that conventional optical microscopy cannot reach the molecular scale, something desirable both in biological and in physical sciences. The goals of our project are ambitious, but this makes them more worthy to be achieved.

Why Macquarie?
I’ve chosen to do my PhD at Macquarie University under the supervision of Associate Professor James Rabeau and Professor Jason Twamley, along and with the wise guidance of Dr Torsten Gaebel, because here various groups are actively working on these “diamond” topics. People with different theoretical and experimental backgrounds are working together with the declared intent to play a leading role in this field which has been capturing the attention of many scientists across the world.

The Future?
To be honest, I can’t see where I will be in few years from now, but I know that while I am at Macquarie I’ll take the challenging tasks as stimuli rather than obstacles, trying to mould trials into intellectual and cultural growth opportunities!

Photo
I am holding a model of the tetrahedral structure of diamond.