Introduction

I am a first year PhD student supervised by Dr Gavin Morley and the title of my PhD project is "Diamond magnetometry in cars and aircraft". Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres in diamond are promising magnetic field sensors that are beginning to rival competitor technologies such as atomic vapour magnetometers in sensitivity. The current magnetometer developed by the group is one of the world's most sensitive fibre-coupled NV magnetometers. Nonetheless, currently this design is sensitive to the effect of vibrations which greatly reduce its sensitivity, precluding the use of the magnetometer for applications on moving platforms such as geo-surveying, magnetic navigation and battery diagnostics. In my PhD I am working on developing a new, more robust and vibration insensitive design as well as on further improving the sensitivity. This project is sponsored by DSTL.

Background

I graduated from the University of Warwick in 2020 with a first class Masters degree in Physics, with honours. During the fourth year of my undergraduate degree I completed a Masters project working on diamond magnetometry, entitled "Spin qubit experiments in diamond", supervised by Dr Gavin Morley. Having enjoyed working on this project I was keen to continue working in this field.

In the summer of the second year of my undergraduate degree I completed a ten week research project studying the properties of high frequency ultrasound transducers for use in air flow measurement, supervised by Professor Steve Dixon and sponsored by Dynoptic Systems Ltd. The following summer I took part in an eight week URSS project supervised by Dr James Lloyd-Hughes studying the effect of iodine doping on the conductivity of carbon nanotubes using THz and Raman spectroscopy. Working on these projects helped to confirm my desire to start a PhD.

Contact Details:

Email: S.Graham.4@warwick.ac.uk