Newly developed tiny antennas, likened to spotlights on the nanoscale, offer the potential to measure food safety, identify pollutants in the air and even quickly diagnose and treat cancer, according to the Australian scientists who created them. The new antennas are cubic in shape. They do a better job than previous spherical ones at directing an ultra-narrow beam of light where it is needed, with little or no loss due to heating and scattering, they say.
In a paper published in the Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing, Debabrata Sikdar of Monash University in Victoria, Australia, and colleagues describe these and other envisioned applications for their nanocubes in "laboratories-on-a-chip." The cubes, composed of insulating, rather than conducting or semiconducting materials as were the spherical versions, are easier to fabricate as well as more effective, he says.
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Ref: Optically Resonant Magneto-Electric Cubic Nanoantennas for Ultra-Directional Light Scattering. Journal of Applied Physics, 2015 | DOI: 10.1063/1.4907536
New research on nano-electromechanical systems to further biomedicine, food safety, photovoltaics, etc.
