Laser Biomedical Applications Division

Nano-biophotonics for Biomedical Diagnosis

Nano-biophotonics is an emerging field created by the fusion of photonics, nanotechnology and biomedical sciences. An interdisciplinary team comprising physicists, biologists, biotechnologists and chemists are applying their skills towards development of novel techniques for in vitro disease diagnosis and treatment.

(1) Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS)

Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a technique where the Raman signal gets considerably enhanced owing to the electromagnetic field enhancement due to localized surface plasmon resonances. Metal nanoparticles and specialized substrates for SERS are generally fabricated with metals (mainly gold and silver) that support the plasmonic resonance.

(2) Nano-Trap Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (NTERS)

NTERS combines the Drop-Coating Deposition (DCD), metal nanoparticle trapping and the nanoparticle based SERS to result in Raman signal enhancement that is much superior to any of these techniques. The technique relies on the formation of “hotspots” upon drying up of a micro volume drop of the liquid containing an aqueous mixture of nanoparticles and analytes on an aluminium foil substrate in the presence of a focused Raman excitation laser beam.

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