Light propagation can be controlled with plasmonic interfaces that introduce abrupt phase shifts along the optical path.

The isolated electronic spin system of the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre in diamond offers unique possibilities to be employed as a nanoscale sensor for detection and imaging of weak magnetic fields. Magnetic imaging with nanometric resolution and field detection capabilities in the nanotesla range are enabled by the atomic-size and exceptionally long spin-coherence times of this naturally occurring defect. The exciting perspectives that ensue from these characteristics have triggered vivid experimental activities in the emerging field of 'NV magnetometry'. It is the purpose of this article to review the recent progress in high-sensitivity nanoscale NV magnetometry, generate an overview of the most pertinent results of the last years and highlight perspectives for future developments. We will present the physical principles that allow for magnetic field detection with NV centres and discuss first applications of NV magnetometers that have been demonstrated in the context of nano magnetism, mesoscopic physics and the life sciences.

We demonstrate diamond-based quantum imaging of the current flow in graphene structures with submicrometer resolution.

The capacity to propagate magnetic domain walls with spin-polarized currents underpins several schemes for information storage and processing using spintronic devices. A key question involves the internal structure of the domain walls, which governs their response to certain current-driven torques such as the spin Hall effect. Here we show that magnetic microscopy based on a single nitrogen-vacancy defect in diamond can provide a direct determination of the internal wall structure in ultrathin ferromagnetic films under ambient conditions. We find pure Bloch walls in Ta/CoFeB(1 nm)/MgO, while left-handed Néel walls are observed in Pt/Co(0.6 nm)/AlO_x. The latter indicates the presence of a sizable interfacial Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction, which has strong bearing on the feasibility of exploiting novel chiral states such as skyrmions for information technologies.

Conventional optical components rely on the propagation effect to control the phase and polarization of light beams. One can instead exploit abrupt phase and polarization changes associated with scattered light from optical resonators to control light propagation. In this paper, we discuss the optical responses of anisotropic plasmonic antennas and a new class of planar optical components (“metasurfaces”) based on arrays of these antennas. To demonstrate the versatility of metasurfaces, we show the design and experimental realization of a number of flat optical components: 1) metasurfaces with a constant interfacial phase gradient that deflect light into arbitrary directions; 2) metasurfaces with anisotropic optical responses that create light beams of arbitrary polarization over a wide wavelength range; 3) planar lenses and axicons that generate spherical wavefronts and nondiffracting Bessel beams, respectively; and 4) metasurfaces with spiral phase distributions that create optical vortex beams of well-defined orbital angular momentum.