̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Jeremy Baumberg

Colour-changing magnifying glass gives clear view of infrared light

sc604 — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 19:00:00 +0000

Detecting light beyond the visible red range of our eyes is hard to do, because infrared light carries so little energy compared to ambient heat at room temperature. This obscures infrared light unless specialised detectors are chilled to very low temperatures, which is both expensive and energy-intensive.

Now researchers led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have demonstrated a new concept in detecting infrared light, showing how to convert it into visible light, which is easily detected.

In collaboration with colleagues from the UK, Spain and Belgium, the team used a single layer of molecules to absorb the mid-infrared light inside their vibrating chemical bonds. These shaking molecules can donate their energy to visible light that they encounter, ‘upconverting’ it to emissions closer to the blue end of the spectrum, which can then be detected by modern visible-light cameras.

̽��ֱ��results, reported in the journal Science, open up new low-cost ways to sense contaminants, track cancers, check gas mixtures, and remotely sense the outer universe.

̽��ֱ��challenge faced by the researchers was to make sure the quaking molecules met the visible light quickly enough. “This meant we had to trap light really tightly around the molecules, by squeezing it into crevices surrounded by gold,” said first author Angelos Xomalis from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.

̽��ֱ��researchers devised a way to sandwich single molecular layers between a mirror and tiny chunks of gold, only possible with ‘meta-materials’ that can twist and squeeze light into volumes a billion times smaller than a human hair.

“Trapping these different colours of light at the same time was hard, but we wanted to find a way that wouldn’t be expensive and could easily produce practical devices,” said co-author Dr Rohit Chikkaraddy from the Cavendish Laboratory, who devised the experiments based on his simulations of light in these building blocks.

“It’s like listening to slow-rippling earthquake waves by colliding them with a violin string to get a high whistle that’s easy to hear, and without breaking the violin,” said Professor Jeremy Baumberg of the NanoPhotonics Centre at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research.

̽��ֱ��researchers emphasise that while it is early days, there are many ways to optimise the performance of these inexpensive molecular detectors, which then can access rich information in this window of the spectrum.

From astronomical observations of galactic structures to sensing human hormones or early signs of invasive cancers, many technologies can benefit from this new detector advance.

̽��ֱ��research was conducted by a team from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, KU Leuven, ̽��ֱ�� College London (UCL), the Faraday Institution, and Universitat Politècnica de València.

Jeremy Baumberg is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Angelos Xomalis et al. ‘Detecting mid-infrared light by molecular frequency upconversion with dual-wavelength hybrid nanoantennas’, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abk2593

By trapping light into tiny crevices of gold, researchers have coaxed molecules to convert invisible infrared into visible light, creating new low-cost detectors for sensing.

It’s like listening to slow-rippling earthquake waves by colliding them with a violin string to get a high whistle that’s easy to hear, and without breaking the violin

Jeremy Baumberg

NanoPhotonics Cambridge /Ermanno Miele, Jeremy Baumberg

Nano-antennas convert invisible infrared into visible light

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Cambridge researchers awarded European Research Council funding

sc604 — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 13:19:46 +0000

One hundred and eighty-five senior scientists from across Europe were awarded grants in today’s announcement, representing a total of €450 million in research funding. ̽��ֱ��UK has 34 grantees in this year’s funding round, the second-most of any ERC participating country.

ERC grants are awarded through open competition to projects headed by starting and established researchers, irrespective of their origins, who are working or moving to work in Europe. ̽��ֱ��sole criterion for selection is scientific excellence.

ERC Advanced Grants are designed to support excellent scientists in any field with a recognised track record of research achievements in the last ten years.

Professors Mete Atatüre and Jeremy Baumberg, both based at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, work on diverse ways to create new and strange interactions of light with matter that is built from tiny nano-sized building blocks.

Baumberg’s PICOFORCE project traps light down to the size of individual atoms which will allow him to invent new ways of tugging them, levitating them, and putting them together. Such work uncovers the mysteries of how molecules and metals interact, crucial for creating energy sustainably, storing it, and developing electronics that can switch with thousands of times less power need than currently.

"This funding recognises the huge need for fundamental science to advance our knowledge of the world – only the most imaginative and game-changing science gets such funding," said Baumberg.

Atatüre’s project, PEDESTAL, investigates diamond as a material platform for quantum networks. What gives gems their colour also turns out to be interesting candidates for quantum computing and communication technologies. By developing large-scale diamond-semiconductor hybrid quantum devices, the project aims to demonstrate high-rate and high-fidelity remote entanglement generation, a building block for a quantum internet.

" ̽��ֱ��impact of ERC funding on my group’s research had been incredible in the last 12 years, through Starting and Consolidator grants. I am very happy that with this new grant we as UK scientists can continue to play an important part in the vibrant research culture of Europe," said Atatüre.

Professor Judith Driscoll from Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy was also awarded ERC funding for her work on nanostructured electronic materials. She is also spearheading joint work of her team, as well as those of Baumberg and Atatüre, on low-energy IT devices.

"My approach uses a different way of designing and creating oxide nano-scale film structures with different materials to both create new electronic device functions as well as much more reliable and uniform existing functions," she said. "Cambridge is a fantastic place that enables all our approaches to come together, driven by cohorts of inspirational young researchers in our UK-funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology – the NanoDTC."

Professor John Robb from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology was awarded an ERC grant for the ANCESTORS project on the politics of death in prehistoric Europe. ̽��ֱ��project takes the methods developed in the ‘After the Plague’ project and the taphonomy methods developed in the Scaloria Cave project and apply them to a major theoretical problem in European prehistory - the nature of community and the rise of inequality.

"This project is really exciting and I’ll be working with wonderful colleagues Dr Christiana ‘Freddi’ Scheib at the ̽��ֱ�� of Tartu and Dr Mary Anne Tafuri at Sapienza ̽��ֱ�� of Rome," said Robb. " ̽��ֱ��results will allow us to evaluate for the first time how inequality affected lives in prehistoric Europe and what role ancestors played in it."

Four researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have won advanced grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premier research funding body.

Yes

̽��ֱ��'P' word

lw355 — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 08:00:00 +0000

How do we shift our 'take, make, throw-away' plastic world towards 'recycle, recover, re-use'? It's time for blue-sky thinking plus practical measures in the battle to reduce plastic waste.

Smallest pixels ever created could light up colour-changing buildings

sc604 — Fri, 10 May 2019 18:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��colour pixels, developed by a team of scientists led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, are compatible with roll-to-roll fabrication on flexible plastic films, dramatically reducing their production cost. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the journal Science Advances.

It has been a long-held dream to mimic the colour-changing skin of octopus or squid, allowing people or objects to disappear into the natural background, but making large-area flexible display screens is still prohibitively expensive because they are constructed from highly precise multiple layers.

At the centre of the pixels developed by the Cambridge scientists is a tiny particle of gold a few billionths of a metre across. ̽��ֱ��grain sits on top of a reflective surface, trapping light in the gap in between. Surrounding each grain is a thin sticky coating which changes chemically when electrically switched, causing the pixel to change colour across the spectrum.

̽��ֱ��team of scientists, from different disciplines including physics, chemistry and manufacturing, made the pixels by coating vats of golden grains with an active polymer called polyaniline and then spraying them onto flexible mirror-coated plastic, to dramatically drive down production cost.

̽��ֱ��pixels are the smallest yet created, a million times smaller than typical smartphone pixels. They can be seen in bright sunlight and because they do not need constant power to keep their set colour, have an energy performance that makes large areas feasible and sustainable. “We started by washing them over aluminized food packets, but then found aerosol spraying is faster,” said co-lead author Hyeon-Ho Jeong from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.

“These are not the normal tools of nanotechnology, but this sort of radical approach is needed to make sustainable technologies feasible,” said Professor Jeremy J Baumberg of the NanoPhotonics Centre at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research. “ ̽��ֱ��strange physics of light on the nanoscale allows it to be switched, even if less than a tenth of the film is coated with our active pixels. That’s because the apparent size of each pixel for light is many times larger than their physical area when using these resonant gold architectures.”

̽��ֱ��pixels could enable a host of new application possibilities such as building-sized display screens, architecture which can switch off solar heat load, active camouflage clothing and coatings, as well as tiny indicators for coming internet-of-things devices.

̽��ֱ��team are currently working at improving the colour range and are looking for partners to develop the technology further.

Reference:
Jialong Peng et al. ‘Scalable electrochromic nanopixels using plasmonics.’ Science Advances (2019). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2205

̽��ֱ��smallest pixels yet created – a million times smaller than those in smartphones, made by trapping particles of light under tiny rocks of gold – could be used for new types of large-scale flexible displays, big enough to cover entire buildings.

These are not the normal tools of nanotechnology, but this sort of radical approach is needed to make sustainable technologies feasible

Jeremy Baumberg

NanoPhotonics Cambridge/Hyeon-Ho Jeong, Jialong Peng

Electrochromic nanoparticle-on-mirror constructs (eNPoMs)

Yes

Cambridge receives new funding to support PhD students in science and engineering

sc604 — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 09:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��funding, from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and industrial and institutional partners, will support the establishment of five new CDTs at Cambridge. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� will be a partner institution in an additional four new CDTs. ̽��ֱ��results of the latest CDT funding round were announced today by EPSRC at an event in London.

In total, EPSRC is supporting 75 new CDTs across the UK, representing a total investment of £446 million. ̽��ֱ��Centres’ 1,400 project partners have contributed £386 million in cash and in-kind support, and include companies such as Tata Steel and Procter and Gamble and charities such as Cancer Research UK. ̽��ֱ��funding represents one of the UK’s most significant investments in research skills.

Science and Innovation Minister Chris Skidmore said: “As we explore new research to boost our economy with an increase of over £7 billion invested in R&D over five years to 2021/22 – the highest increase for over 40 years – we will need skilled people to turn ideas into inventions that can have a positive impact on our daily lives.

“ ̽��ֱ��Centres for Doctoral Training at universities across the country will offer the next generation of PhD students the ability to get ahead of the curve. In addition, this has resulted in nearly £400 million being leveraged from industry partners. This is our modern Industrial Strategy in action, ensuring all corners of the UK thrive with the skills they need for the jobs of tomorrow.

“As Science Minister, I’m delighted we’re making this massive investment in postgraduate students as part of our increased investment in R&D.”

CDT students are funded for four years and the programme includes technical and transferrable skills training as well as a research element. ̽��ֱ��centres bring together diverse areas of expertise to provide engineers and scientists with the skills, knowledge and confidence to tackle today’s evolving issues and future challenges.

̽��ֱ��importance of developing STEM skills is a key part of the Government’s Industrial Strategy, ensuring that all areas of the UK embrace innovation and build the skills the economy needs to thrive.

̽��ֱ��five Cambridge-led CDTs are:

CDT in Future Propulsion and Power, led by Dr Graham Pullan (Department of Engineering)
CDT in Integrated Functional Nano (i4Nano), led by Professor Jeremy Baumberg (Department of Physics)
CDT in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment: Resilience in a Changing World (FIBE2), led by Professor Abir Al-Tabbaa (Department of Engineering)
CDT in Sensor Technologies for a Healthy and Sustainable Future, led by Professor Clemens Kaminski (Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology)
CDT in Automated Chemical Synthesis Enabled by Digital Molecular Technologies, led by Professor Matthew Gaunt (Department of Chemistry)

̽��ֱ��first cohort of students in the new CDTs will begin their studies in October.

Professor Lynn Gladden, EPSRC’s Executive Chair, said: “ ̽��ֱ��UK’s research base makes the discoveries that lead to innovations and these can improve lives and generate income for the UK. Centres for Doctoral Training have already proven to be successful in attracting the world’s brightest minds and industry support to address the scientific and engineering challenges we face. This new cadre will continue to build on previous investment.”

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has received new government and industrial funding to support at least 350 PhD students over the next eight years, via the creation of new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs).

Photo by Sweet Ice Cream Photography on Unsplash

Yes

Synthetic organs, nanobots and DNA ‘scissors’: the future of medicine

lw355 — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 08:00:43 +0000

In a new film to coincide with the recent launch of the Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences, researchers discuss some of the most exciting developments in medical research and set out their vision for the next 50 years.

Professor Jeremy Baumberg from the NanoPhotonics Centre discusses a future in which diagnoses do not have to rely on asking a patient how they are feeling, but rather are carried out by nanomachines that patrol our bodies, looking for and repairing problems. Professor Michelle Oyen from the Department of Engineering talks about using artificial scaffolds to create ‘off-the-shelf’ replacement organs that could help solve the shortage of donated organs. Dr Sanjay Sinha from the Wellcome Trust-MRC Stem Cell Institute sees us using stem cell ‘patches’ to repair damaged hearts and return their function back to normal.

Dr Alasdair Russell from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute describes how recent breakthroughs in the use of CRISPR-Cas9 – a DNA editing tool – will enable us to snip out and replace defective regions of the genome, curing diseases in individual patients; and lawyer Dr Kathy Liddell, from the Cambridge Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, highlights how research around law and ethics will help to make gene editing safe.

Professor Gillian Griffiths, Director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, envisages us weaponising ‘killer T cells’ – important immune system warriors – to hunt down and destroy even the most evasive of cancer cells.

All of these developments will help transform the field of medicine, says Professor Chris Lowe, Director of the Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences, who sees this as an exciting time for medicine. New developments have the potential to transform healthcare “right the way from how you handle the patient to actually delivering the final therapeutic product - and that’s the exciting thing”.

Read more about research on future therapeutics in Research Horizons magazine.

Nanobots that patrol our bodies, killer immune cells hunting and destroying cancer cells, biological scissors that cut out defective genes: these are just some of technologies that Cambridge researchers are developing which are set to revolutionise medicine in the future.

̽��ֱ��Future of Medicine

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

How to train your drugs: from nanotherapeutics to nanobots

sc604 — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 15:00:56 +0000

Chemotherapy benefits a great many patients but the side effects can be brutal.

When a patient is injected with an anti-cancer drug, the idea is that the molecules will seek out and destroy rogue tumour cells. However, relatively large amounts need to be administered to reach the target in high enough concentrations to be effective. As a result of this high drug concentration, healthy cells may be killed as well as cancer cells, leaving many patients weak, nauseated and vulnerable to infection.

One way that researchers are attempting to improve the safety and efficacy of drugs is to use a relatively new area of research known as nanothrapeutics to target drug delivery just to the cells that need it.

Professor Sir Mark Welland is Head of the Electrical Engineering Division at Cambridge. In recent years, his research has focused on nanotherapeutics, working in collaboration with clinicians and industry to develop better, safer drugs. He and his colleagues don’t design new drugs; instead, they design and build smart packaging for existing drugs.

Nanotherapeutics come in many different configurations, but the easiest way to think about them is as small, benign particles filled with a drug. They can be injected in the same way as a normal drug, and are carried through the bloodstream to the target organ, tissue or cell. At this point, a change in the local environment, such as pH, or the use of light or ultrasound, causes the nanoparticles to release their cargo.

Nano-sized tools are increasingly being looked at for diagnosis, drug delivery and therapy. “There are a huge number of possibilities right now, and probably more to come, which is why there’s been so much interest,” says Welland. Using clever chemistry and engineering at the nanoscale, drugs can be ‘taught’ to behave like a Trojan horse, or to hold their fire until just the right moment, or to recognise the target they’re looking for.

“We always try to use techniques that can be scaled up – we avoid using expensive chemistries or expensive equipment, and we’ve been reasonably successful in that,” he adds. “By keeping costs down and using scalable techniques, we’ve got a far better chance of making a successful treatment for patients.”

In 2014, he and collaborators demonstrated that gold nanoparticles could be used to ‘smuggle’ chemotherapy drugs into cancer cells in glioblastoma multiforme, the most common and aggressive type of brain cancer in adults, which is notoriously difficult to treat. ̽��ֱ��team engineered nanostructures containing gold and cisplatin, a conventional chemotherapy drug. A coating on the particles made them attracted to tumour cells from glioblastoma patients, so that the nanostructures bound and were absorbed into the cancer cells.

Once inside, these nanostructures were exposed to radiotherapy. This caused the gold to release electrons that damaged the cancer cell’s DNA and its overall structure, enhancing the impact of the chemotherapy drug. ̽��ֱ��process was so effective that 20 days later, the cell culture showed no evidence of any revival, suggesting that the tumour cells had been destroyed.

While the technique is still several years away from use in humans, tests have begun in mice. Welland’s group is working with MedImmune, the biologics R&D arm of pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, to study the stability of drugs and to design ways to deliver them more effectively using nanotechnology.

“One of the great advantages of working with MedImmune is they understand precisely what the requirements are for a drug to be approved. We would shut down lines of research where we thought it was never going to get to the point of approval by the regulators,” says Welland. “It’s important to be pragmatic about it so that only the approaches with the best chance of working in patients are taken forward.”

̽��ֱ��researchers are also targeting diseases like tuberculosis (TB). With funding from the Rosetrees Trust, Welland and postdoctoral researcher Dr Íris da luz Batalha are working with Professor Andres Floto in the Department of Medicine to improve the efficacy of TB drugs.

Their solution has been to design and develop nontoxic, biodegradable polymers that can be ‘fused’ with TB drug molecules. As polymer molecules have a long, chain-like shape, drugs can be attached along the length of the polymer backbone, meaning that very large amounts of the drug can be loaded onto each polymer molecule. ̽��ֱ��polymers are stable in the bloodstream and release the drugs they carry when they reach the target cell. Inside the cell, the pH drops, which causes the polymer to release the drug.

In fact, the polymers worked so well for TB drugs that another of Welland’s postdoctoral researchers, Dr Myriam Ouberaï, has formed a start-up company, Spirea, which is raising funding to develop the polymers for use with oncology drugs. Ouberaï is hoping to establish a collaboration with a pharma company in the next two years.

“Designing these particles, loading them with drugs and making them clever so that they release their cargo in a controlled and precise way: it’s quite a technical challenge,” adds Welland. “ ̽��ֱ��main reason I’m interested in the challenge is I want to see something working in the clinic – I want to see something working in patients.”

Could nanotechnology move beyond therapeutics to a time when nanomachines keep us healthy by patrolling, monitoring and repairing the body?

Nanomachines have long been a dream of scientists and public alike. But working out how to make them move has meant they’ve remained in the realm of science fiction.

But last year, Professor Jeremy Baumberg and colleagues in Cambridge and the ̽��ֱ�� of Bath developed the world’s tiniest engine – just a few billionths of a metre in size. It’s biocompatible, cost-effective to manufacture, fast to respond and energy efficient.

̽��ֱ��forces exerted by these ‘ANTs’ (for ‘actuating nano-transducers’) are nearly a hundred times larger than those for any known device, motor or muscle. To make them, tiny charged particles of gold, bound together with a temperature-responsive polymer gel, are heated with a laser. As the polymer coatings expel water from the gel and collapse, a large amount of elastic energy is stored in a fraction of a second. On cooling, the particles spring apart and release energy.

̽��ֱ��researchers hope to use this ability of ANTs to produce very large forces relative to their weight to develop three-dimensional machines that swim, have pumps that take on fluid to sense the environment and are small enough to move around our bloodstream.

Working with Cambridge Enterprise, the ̽��ֱ��’s commercialisation arm, the team in Cambridge's Nanophotonics Centre hopes to commercialise the technology for microfluidics bio-applications. The work is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the European Research Council.

“There’s a revolution happening in personalised healthcare, and for that we need sensors not just on the outside but on the inside,” explains Baumberg, who leads an interdisciplinary Strategic Research Network and Doctoral Training Centre focused on nanoscience and nanotechnology.

“Nanoscience is driving this. We are now building technology that allows us to even imagine these futures.”

Read more about research on future therapeutics in Research Horizons magazine.

Nanotechnology is creating new opportunities for fighting disease – from delivering drugs in smart packaging to nanobots powered by the world’s tiniest engines.

Designing these particles, loading them with drugs and making them clever so that they release their cargo in a controlled and precise way: it’s quite a technical challenge.

Mark Welland

Yu Ji

Artist's impression of a nanobot

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

World’s 'smallest magnifying glass' makes it possible to see individual chemical bonds between atoms

sc604 — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 19:00:00 +0000

For centuries, scientists believed that light, like all waves, couldn’t be focused down smaller than its wavelength, just under a millionth of a metre. Now, researchers led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have created the world’s smallest magnifying glass, which focuses light a billion times more tightly, down to the scale of single atoms.

In collaboration with European colleagues, the team used highly conductive gold nanoparticles to make the world’s tiniest optical cavity, so small that only a single molecule can fit within it. ̽��ֱ��cavity – called a ‘pico-cavity’ by the researchers – consists of a bump in a gold nanostructure the size of a single atom, and confines light to less than a billionth of a metre. ̽��ֱ��results, reported in the journal Science, open up new ways to study the interaction of light and matter, including the possibility of making the molecules in the cavity undergo new sorts of chemical reactions, which could enable the development of entirely new types of sensors.

According to the researchers, building nanostructures with single atom control was extremely challenging. “We had to cool our samples to -260°C in order to freeze the scurrying gold atoms,” said Felix Benz, lead author of the study. ̽��ֱ��researchers shone laser light on the sample to build the pico-cavities, allowing them to watch single atom movement in real time.

“Our models suggested that individual atoms sticking out might act as tiny lightning rods, but focusing light instead of electricity,” said Professor Javier Aizpurua from the Center for Materials Physics in San Sebastian in Spain, who led the theoretical section of this work.

“Even single gold atoms behave just like tiny metallic ball bearings in our experiments, with conducting electrons roaming around, which is very different from their quantum life where electrons are bound to their nucleus,” said Professor Jeremy Baumberg of the NanoPhotonics Centre at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research.

̽��ֱ��findings have the potential to open a whole new field of light-catalysed chemical reactions, allowing complex molecules to be built from smaller components. Additionally, there is the possibility of new opto-mechanical data storage devices, allowing information to be written and read by light and stored in the form of molecular vibrations.

̽��ֱ��research is funded as part of a UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) investment in the Cambridge NanoPhotonics Centre, as well as the European Research Council (ERC) and the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability, and supported by the Spanish Council for Research (CSIC) and the ̽��ֱ�� of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

Reference:
Felix Benz et al. ‘Single-molecule optomechanics in ‘pico-cavities’.’ Science (2016). DOI: 10.1126/science.aah5243

Inset image: ̽��ֱ��presence of the sharp metal tip on a plasma sphere concentrates the electric field into its vicinity, initiating a spark. Credit: NanoPhotonics Cambridge

Using the strange properties of tiny particles of gold, researchers have concentrated light down smaller than a single atom, letting them look at individual chemical bonds inside molecules, and opening up new ways to study light and matter.

Single gold atoms behave just like tiny metallic ball bearings in our experiments, with conducting electrons roaming around, which is very different from their quantum life.

Jeremy Baumberg

NanoPhotonics Cambridge/Bart deNijs

Artist's impression

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes