Feb 20, 2016
Optical Interferometry Going Nanoscale to Make New Types of Biosensors
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: biotech/medical, electronics, nanotechnology
Plasmonics, the study of how electrons behave in a metal under an electromagnetic field, requires the use of specialty coherent light sources as a basic tool. Optical interferometry can potentially become more important in biomedicine if only the technology could be made more compact, practical, and proven useful.
Toward that end researchers at Brown University have developed a way of using plasmonics techniques without using a coherent light source at all. This allows optical interferometry at the nanoscale and should lead to new types of biomedical sensors that can do rapid wide spectrum analysis for a variety of markers.
Here’s more details about the technology from Brown University: