Towards Application of Nanodiamonds for in-situ Monitoring of Radicals in Liquid Phase Chemical Reactions

In many chemical reactions, short-lived radical intermediates play a crucial role, while detecting such short-lived species in-situ remains challenging. The optically readable electronic spin of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond is a nanoscale sensor for such radical species: its longitudinal spin relaxation time T$₁$ reacts to magnetic fluctuations from the unpaired electrons of radical species in its local environment. In this setting, we demonstrate the successful in-situ detection of the nitroxide radical 2,2,6,6-Tetramethylpiperidinyloxyl (TEMPO) using NV center-based T₁ relaxometry after depositing nanodiamonds onto the inner wall of a glass cuvette. A significant concentration-dependent shortening of the relaxation time was observed, from 197 μs pm 21 μs without radical to 66 μs pm 30 μs at a concentration of 1 M TEMPO. The detection is sensitive in the nanomolar (nM) range and the determined signal-to-noise ratio is between 1.6 and 3.