Measure fields that classical instruments cannot detect
DeteQt builds room-temperature NV-center diamond chips that deliver picotesla magnetic sensitivity without cryogenic infrastructure, enabling precision survey and medical imaging deployments outside the laboratory.
NV-center diamond: the physics of sensitivity
Nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond are atomic-scale defects whose spin state responds measurably to magnetic fields. DeteQt's chip-scale implementation brings this sensitivity to field-deployable hardware.
Why room temperature changes everything
Superconducting magnetometers (SQUIDs) achieve comparable sensitivity but require liquid-helium cooling, fixed installations, and significant infrastructure. NV-center sensing operates at ambient temperature, making the same picotesla noise floors available to portable survey equipment and clinical deployments outside shielded facilities.
- Sub-10 pT/Hz sensitivity at room temperature
- No cryogenic infrastructure required
- ODMR-based absolute field measurement
- Chip-scale form factor for system integration
Two measurement challenges, one sensor platform
The same NV-center chip architecture serves both geophysical survey and biomedical measurement. Field requirements differ; the underlying physics does not.
Sub-surface anomaly detection in hard-rock mining environments where conventional magnetometers are compromised by equipment EMI and remanent magnetisation in host rock.
Magnetoencephalography and ultra-low-field MRI without the magnetically shielded room requirements that currently restrict these modalities to specialist facilities.
The sensor head is a millimeter-scale diamond chip integrated with on-chip microwave drive and optical readout, suitable for dense array configurations and wearable form factors.
From spin resonance to field measurement
A 532 nm green laser pumps NV centers into the ms=0 ground state, initializing the spin population for measurement.
A swept microwave signal drives spin transitions at resonance frequencies that shift linearly with the local magnetic field amplitude.
Fluorescence intensity at 637 nm encodes spin state. The ODMR spectrum is deconvolved by our AI signal stack to extract the field vector with picotesla precision.
Key sensor specifications
What evaluation partners are observing
The noise floor in our hard-rock test corridor was consistent with the pre-deployment spec sheet. That rarely happens with prototype equipment in a live mining environment.
Running MEG-class measurements without booking time on a shielded facility is genuinely new capability. The setup overhead is comparable to a clinical EEG system.
Evaluate DeteQt sensors in your measurement environment
The evaluation kit includes a pre-configured sensor module, integration guide, and access to our signal processing software stack.
Request Evaluation Kit