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In a diamond anvil cell, pressure squeezes a material as if it were buried hundreds of kilometers deep inside the Earth. Inside this chamber, tiny diamond sensors, color centers, respond to microwaves and report on the magnetic fields and temperatures around them. But getting microwaves to the sensor through the narrow gap between the diamonds is like trying to send a radio signal through a keyhole.

The authors carved a narrow slot into a chamber component, creating a miniature antenna that directs microwaves straight at the sensor. Compared with a plain wire, the signal is stronger and spreads more evenly across the entire working area. They tested it at pressures up to 48 gigapascals — nearly half a million atmospheres.

Now it's possible to monitor many sensors scattered across a sample at once, seeing how pressure changes the material at different points. This is a step toward mapping magnetic fields and temperatures inside compressed materials, like taking a snapshot of the invisible forces that govern matter in the depths of planets.

Original abstract

as written by the authors arXiv:2601.11725

Nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers have been demonstrated as a useful tool in high pressure environments. However, the geometry and small working area of the diamond anvil cells (DACs) used to apply pressure present a challenge to effective delivery of microwave (mw) fields. We designed and characterized a novel slotted design for mw transmission to nitrogen-vacancy centers (NVs) in a diamond anvil cell via zero-field and in-field optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) measurements across pressures between 1 and 48 GPa. The mw fields experienced by NVs across the diamond culet was calculated from Rabi frequency and found to be higher and more uniform than those generated by an equivalent simple mw line, which will improve performance for wide-field, high-pressure measurements to probe spatial variations across samples under pressure.