Our lab’s sensing work was recently featured in the University of Arizona Alumni Association Magazine: Optics Solutions for High-Tech Healthcare  and the magazine NanoScientific: How Covid-19 Diagnostic Tests Work.

The lab has several upcoming conference presentations:

OSA Biophotonics Congress (Tucson, AZ, April 2019):

Jeffrey Melzer: “Theoretical Limits of Nanoparticle Optical Manipulation”

Weilin Liu: “Accurate Dipole Modeling of Forces on a Metallic Nanoparticle With a Larger Radius Than Skin Depth”

Zhen Xiong: “Optimized Reconstruction for Sparse and Small Targets in Lens-free Holographic Microscopy”

Cheng Li: “Plasmonic Dark Modes for Enhanced Microcavity Biosensing”

 

SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing (Baltimore, MD, April 2019):

Euan McLeod: “Optimization of small target sensing in lensfree microscopes”

Our work on manipulating nanoparticles at high speed using optical tweezers was recently featured in Advances in Engineering.

Congratulations to Jeffrey Melzer, who is one of 20 regional finalists for the 2018 Educational Award sponsored by Edmund Optics.

We use computational approaches that harness sparsity to detect particularly small particles relative to background noise in lensfree holographic microscopy. We just published this approach (Optics Express), which will help us to create sensitive, portable, cost-effective, and high dynamic-range biosensors.

Earlier this year, our lab was awarded federal grants for the design and fabrication of nanophotonic structures on microtoroid chemical sensors (DTRA), and for the design and fabrication of nanophotonic structures on image sensors (NSF). The chemical sensing project is led by Judith Su’s lab.

Congratulations to both Maryam and Weilin, who transferred from Master’s students to Ph.D. students this year.

Earlier this year, we published what we believe is the fastest manipulation of nanoparticles using optical tweezers to date (ACS Nano). This high-speed manipulation can enable rapid prototyping of 3D nanofabricated devices.

It’s been a long time since I posted any news, so I’m going to cover several important events from the past year in a few posts today.

“Microscopy without lenses,” http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3693