College of Science & Engineering
Twin Cities
This research group focuses on the interaction of light with metallic nanostructures for the use of biosensing, metamaterials, and spectroscopy. By using microfabrication techniques, they fabricate small metallic structures that are resonant with light to create extremely high local fields. This large field enhancement enables very strong interactions with matter, even individual molecules, for the use of chemical identification, imaging, and sensing that would not be available to other techniques. Various ongoing projects include the development of novel trapping systems for studying nanoscale liposomes, high-performance design of devices for chemical diagnostics and sensing, and advanced metamatericals for light trapping in photonics. In order to design and study these devices, numerical modeling is used to simulate these structures and their complex coupling with light at the nanoscale.
This group's research was featured on the MSI website in May 2016: A New Method to Detect Single Molecules.