Thesis Defense Announcement: Jacob Feder

Optically-addressable spin qubits are a powerful platform for sensing technologies, offering the ability to detect weak signals with unprecedented sensitivity and atomistic spatial resolution. Recent efforts in the engineering of these spin sensors have mostly focused on solid-state and molecular systems with ground-state spins, which are generally difficult to interface with biological systems. On the other hand, fluorophores with metastable triplet states are ubiquitous and biocompatible, but present some challenges in their spin readout. In this talk, I will describe how we overcome these challenges with a novel spin-readout technique and then develop a spin qubit based on fluorescent proteins, which are among the most common labels used in bioimaging and biosensing. We characterize their optical and spin properties up to room temperature, paving the way for applications in the life sciences, such as highly-multiplexed fluorescence imaging and nanoscale magnetic-field sensing.