Speaker
Damiano Verardo
(Lund University)
Description
Semiconductor nanowires can act as nanoscaled optical
fibers, enabling them to guide and concentrate light emitted
by surface-bound fluorophores. Fluorescent emission can
couple into the nanowire core due to near-field interactions
and, in a free-standing nanowire, it can be guided to its
tip regardless of the emitter position along the nanowire
length. Harnessing this effect would potentially allow
nanowires to be used as signal integrators for the
fluorescence generated close to their surface, increasing
the signal-to-noise ratio.
Detecting the presence of fluorescently labelled molecules
on free standing nanowires can be used to characterize the
diffusion of molecules in a supported lipid bilayer. The
simultaneous observation of hundreds of nanowires with
epifluorescence microscopy allows for the determination of
both concentration and diffusivity with short measurement
times, as this parallel approach can be corrected for bleaching.
