14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists at the Oregon State University (OSU) have recently announced the creation of a new type of “plasmonic nanorod metamaterial,” which relies on the power of small, gold nanorods to create advanced nanosensors. The new devices could have a wide array of applications in fields ranging from medicine and biology to chemistry, ScienceDaily reports. According to the team, the new technology is at least ten times more sensitive than the next best thing, which could enable the creation of highly sensitive sensing devices, fit for detecting hazardous chemicals, or nuclear residues.
“This is very exciting. It's an important new application of nanotechnology and the field of metamaterials, and should find some significant uses in medicine, chemistry and physics,” OSU Associate Professor of Physics Viktor Podolskiy, who has also been a member of the research team, explains. He adds that the new metamaterial is highly customizable, in that it can be made on a number of scales, according to specific needs. It can also be made to detect a wide array of substances and particles, which means that it could be used for bomb detection, or for detecting pathogens in polluted water.
Metamaterials are a special class of structures that has weird properties, based not on its chemical makeup, but rather on the way its internal structure is reshaped. The secret to these materials, physicists and chemist say, is to rearrange their atoms in a manner that would make the “meta” form of a chemical considerably different than its average form. Metamaterials are already being used in the field of optics, where they can lead to the creation of advanced camera sensors, or to the development of invisibility cloaks. Their peculiar atomic structures allow some of them to bend light.
In addition to OSU, the French Universite de Mediterranee, the Canadian Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and the Queen's University of Belfast, in the United Kingdom, were also involved in the research. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is among the agencies that financially supported the new program. Details of the new materials appear in the latest issue of the scientific journal Nature Materials.