By using tiny liquid lenses that self-assemble around microscopic objects, a team from UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has created an optical microscopy method that allows users to directly see objects more than 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Coupled with computer-based computational reconstruction techniques, this portable and cost-effective platform, which has a wide field of view, can detect individual viruses and nanoparticles, making it potentially useful in the diagnosis of diseases in point-of-care settings or areas where medical resources are limited. (more…)
Berkeley Lab scientists develop a new nanotech tool to probe solar-energy conversion
If nanoscience were television, we’d be in the 1950s. Although scientists can make and manipulate nanoscale objects with increasingly awesome control, they are limited to black-and-white imagery for examining those objects. Information about nanoscale chemistry and interactions with light—the atomic-microscopy equivalent to color—is tantalizingly out of reach to all but the most persistent researchers.
But that may all change with the introduction of a new microscopy tool from researchers at the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) that delivers exquisite chemical details with a resolution once thought impossible. The team developed their tool to investigate solar-to-electric energy conversion at its most fundamental level, but their invention promises to reveal new worlds of data to researchers in all walks of nanoscience. (more…)
*Berkeley Lab Researchers Find Simpler Approach to Making Plasmonic Materials*
The question of how many polyhedral nanocrystals of silver can be packed into millimeter-sized supercrystals may not be burning on many lips but the answer holds importance for one of today’s hottest new high-tech fields – plasmonics! Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) may have opened the door to a simpler approach for the fabrication of plasmonic materials by inducing polyhedral-shaped silver nanocrystals to self-assemble into three-dimensional supercrystals of the highest possible density. (more…)
