Microdiamonds as temperature sensors

Estelle Homeyer, Gilles Ledoux, Christophe Dujardin (team Luminescence), Stéphane Pailhès, Régis Debord (team Matériaux pour l’énergie),  in collaboration with the Institute of Physics de Pragues have published an article entitled «Diamond contact-less micrometric temperature sensors» in the journal Applied Physics Letters. This article was the subject of a press release in AIP, and highlighted by several articles, including one in Science  and another in Science&Avenir.

The authors demonstrate in this article that micrometer-sized diamond probes can accurately measure temperature over a wide range (150-800 K) and with an acquisition speed up to kHz. The principle lies in monitoring the modification of an optical property of the sensor : the lifetime of an electronic level excited by a laser pulse, whose value changes by three orders of magnitude over the temperature range studied. Contactless temperature measurements offer many opportunities in fields such as thermoelectricity, the study of friction and biomedical applications.

15/07/2015