Roadmap on biosensing and photonics with advanced nano-optical methods

Abstract

This roadmap, through the contributions of ten groups worldwide, contains different techniques, methods and materials devoted to sensing in nanomedicine. Optics is used in different ways in the detection schemes. Raman, fluorescence and infrared spectroscopies, plasmonics, second harmonic generation and optical tweezers are all used in applications from single molecule detection (both in highly diluted and in highly concentrated solutions) to single cell manipulation. In general, each optical scheme, through device miniaturization and electromagnetic field localization, exploits an intrinsic optical enhancement mechanism in order to increase the sensitivity and selectivity of the device with respect to the complex molecular construct. The materials used for detection include nanoparticles and nanostructures fabricated with different 2D and 3D lithographic methods. It is shown that sensitivity to a single molecule is already accessible whether the system under study is a single cell or a multitude of cells in a molecular mixture. Throughout the roadmap there is an attempt to foresee and to suggest future directions in this interdisciplinary field.

Ultrasensitive hyperspectral imaging and biodetection enabled by dielectric metasurfaces

“…Particularly, in contrast to their plasmonic counterparts, dielectric nanoresonators do not suffer from inherent material absorption losses 14,15 and they can support BIC modes generating extremely sharp resonances and strong light confinement. Importantly, dielectric metasurfaces that exhibit these supercavity modes in visible and near infrared (NIR) wavelengths can be extremely responsive to the local refractive index (RI) changes induced by individual biomolecules, due to their spatial overlap with the surface-confined electromagnetic fields 16 . This is in contrast to conventional Mie-type resonances in silicon subwavelength nanoparticles 15 , which store the field mainly inside the high-index material.…”

Ultrafast Electron Dynamics in Thiolate-Protected Plasmonic Gold Clusters: Size and Ligand Effect

“…[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] Among metallic nanoparticles, gold NPs have attracted significant interest owing to their high chemical and physical stability, biocompatibility, photo-stability and large optical cross sections. [17][18][19] The SPR of gold NPs found applications in manifold or areas 20 that included optical sensing, 21,22 biolog-3 ical imaging, [23][24][25] plasmonic photo-thermal therapy, 4 molecular diagnostics, 2,24,26 surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, 2 metal-enhanced luminescence and plasmonic rulers. 3 Enormous research has focused on the plasmonic properties of Au NPs and significant breakthroughs were made in the field.…”

Applications of self-assembling ultrashort peptides in bionanotechnology

“…4). 10 In the near future, we expect more ultrashort peptides to be applied as bioimaging nanoprobes for SHG or other non-linear optical microscopy. Koizumi et al 77 showed dipeptide derivatives have strong SHG signals and these materials can be used as electro-optical switch.…”