Led by Justus Ndukaife, assistant professor of
electrical engineering, Vanderbilt researchers are the first to
introduce an approach for trapping and moving a nanomaterial known
as a single colloidal nanodiamond with nitrogen-vacancy center
using low power laser beam. The width of a single human hair is
approximately 90,000 nanometers; nanodiamonds are less than 100
nanometers. These carbon-based materials are one of the few that
can release the basic unit of all light—a single photon—a building
block for future quantum photonics applications, Ndukaife
explains.