Virus quantum sensor based on nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond

The development of highly sensitive and rapid biosensing tools targeted to virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is critical to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic and other highly contagious viral disease.  Quantum sensors can play an important role, thanks to their superior sensitivity and fast improvements in recent years.  Here we propose a molecular transducer designed for nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in nanodiamonds, translating the presence of virus RNA into an unambiguous magnetic noise signal that can be optically read out.  With SARS-CoV-2 as an example, we evaluate the performance of the hybrid sensor, including its sensitivity and false negative rate, and compare it to widespread diagnostic methods.  The proposed method is fast and promises to reach a sensitivity down to a few hundreds of RNA copies with false negative rate less than 1%.  The proposed hybrid sensor can be further implemented with different solid-state defects and substrates and integrated with CRISPR technology. We will also show preliminary experimental results including characterization of the hybrid sensor and its response in the presence of virus RNA.