As magnetic resonance imaging technology becomes more and more sensitive, some researchers are setting their sights on the nanoscale. Two independent teams of scientists–one in Germany, the other in California– have recently been successful locating hydrogen atoms via nuclear magnetic resonance in samples mere nanometers across.
“I want to push NMR and MRI to the molecular level,” says Friedemann Reinhard, a physicist at Germany’s University of Stuttgart and leader of one of the studies.
Read more about the studies in an article entitled Diamond-Based Quantum Devices Shrink MRI to Nanoscale, published today in Scientific American.