The team, led by first author Anshuman Nayak and Professor Jason Twamley, used a 128-milligram diamond containing billions of nitrogen-vacancy centers. By manipulating the spin state of those centers, the researchers generated a quantum force that shifted the diamond by approximately 100 nanometers.

Twamley said the diamond is "eight to nine orders of magnitude more massive than the current state-of-the-art spin-mechanical experiments."

The team has not yet achieved full quantum superposition for the diamond, a state in which an object would exist in multiple positions simultaneously. Researchers aim to refine the experimental conditions to reach that phenomenon, and to push the precision of the effect from nanometers toward centimeters.