Sensors with ever higher precision are required in numerous applications. Conventional methods for measuring physical quantities are increasingly reaching their limits. With quantum technologies, more powerful sensors can be realized, which open up new application perspectives in the natural and engineering sciences as well as in the life sciences and medicine due to an even higher sensitivity. In the realization of novel quantum sensors, discrete quantum systems are brought into interaction with the quantity to be measured (e.g., a magnetic field) and their response is used to deduce the measured quantity. Quantum systems can be tailored for the detection of different measuring quantities and thus allow the realization of sensors with unprecedented sensitivity.
The lighthouse project "Integrated Spin Systems for Quantum Sensors", IQ-Sense for short, aims to develop and demonstrate integrated quantum sensors for a variety of application scenarios, especially in the life sciences. To this end, it synergistically links leading scientists from the natural sciences with researchers from the life sciences and medicine.
Together with leading Bavarian research groups from the fields of materials science and quantum-sensing technologies, medical scientists are working on the IQ-Sense project to develop state-of-the-art imaging methods for the analysis of biological tissue. Researchers from the Julius-Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg (JMU), the Walther-Meißner-Institute (WMI) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW) and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are involved in this lighthouse project.