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Sensor on a Chip for Real-Time Environmental Monitoring

University of Delaware researchers Juejun Hu and Chaoying Ni are creating tiny, sensitive devices that will detect organic, inorganic, and biological molecular species at low levels in the environment. They use a focused ion beam to punch holes into a thin strip of chalcogenide glass that is only a few micrometers thick. When light passes through the strip, molecules in the environment selectively absorb one or a few particular colors of the light. The unique optical absorption signals can then be used to identify the presence and concentration of the molecules of interest. Hu and Ni plan to group several of the chip-sized devices together to create a sensor capable of detecting multiple types of molecules. The devices could replace more traditional molecular detectors, which require bulky and expensive equipment.

Topics:
Communications Detectors Diagnostics Environmental Monitoring Green Design & Manufacturing Manufacturing & Prototyping Medical Nanotechnology Optics Photonics Sensors Wireless

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    Transcript

    00:00:04 now for sens on chip device we try to make miniaturized device that can pick up molecules in a very sensitive manner current sensor technology usually involves some kind of benchtop instruments that typically of the size of a large desktop computer and what we are doing is using the photonic technology and Nano fabrication we can make devices that can actually fit into

    00:00:24 one pump the concept is very unique and the size is very small so it can consumes very little energy and inside that little pump size package we have our photonic Crystal device that's made on a small second chip so we have done some theoretical work to study the sensitivity of these devices what we find is we can actually go down to one single molecule idea is to have real

    00:00:49 time monitoring and real time transmission of data monitoring air and water and soil all those things and if we have a small sensor then the advantage we can replace sensor in the field it can perform this monitoring continuously just running on battery power so that's a huge Advantage compared to current benchtop instruments some other potential applications

    00:01:11 include like such as breast analysis so it turns out if some person has certain kind of CDs uh they will exhale some kind of special molecule called biomarker molecules and they typically exist only a very very low concentration so you need to have a very sensitive detection technology in order to pick up the molecules to assist in medical diagnosis