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. 2018 Jun 19;9:2406. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-04798-1

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 1 — Conductivity imaging using the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center. a A metallic sample is deposited onto the flat tip of an in-house-fabricated silicon scanning probe. The flat plateau region is several micrometers in diameter. This ‘sample on tip’ is scanned over a diamond pillar containing a single-NV center. 532 nm excitation is used for optical control and readout of the NV spin triplet. b Illustration demonstrating NV spin relaxation in the presence of a conductor. The stochastic, thermal motion of free electrons produces magnetic fluctuations that increase the spin transition rate Ω between |m_s = 0〉 and |m_s = −1〉, detectable as a reduction of the NV center’s spin relaxation time T₁. c Measurement of the T₁ of an NV center far from any conductor (red squares) and positioned 100 nm above the surface of an 85-nm thick Ag film (blue circles). The specific measurement sequence is discussed in the main text and yields an exponential photoluminescence decay exp(−τ/T₁) with T₁ = 1/3Ω. The presence of the Ag film reduces the NV T₁ fivefold. Error bars correspond to measured standard error