Nanoscale manipulation: Professor Miles Padgett
Issued: Thu, 27 Jun 2013 13:00:00 BST
Professor Miles Padgett is head of the Optics Research Group at Glasgow. The group comprises 15 academic, postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers who are pioneering new techniques that will change the way that scientists create and engage with experiments on a nanoscale.
Richard Bowman is a PhD researcher who, in a collaboration with Professor Lee Cronin and Dr Geoff Cooper in Chemistry, is growing tiny tubes, as narrow as a human hair, out of a chemical substrate to create ‘microscopic plumbing’. Richard uses a tiny laser beam to guide the growth of the hollow crystal microtubes to create complicated networks.
As these tubes are large enough only for a single cell to pass through, they can be used as conduits for transferring single cells from one place to another free from outside interference.
It is hoped that optical manipulation methods such as this may herald a major change in the way that chemists work; for example, it may have an effect in cutting the time and cost incurred in processes like drug development.
Next door to Richard, Michael Lee and Dr Arran Curran are working on a technique that uses optical manipulation technology to trap, move and study objects about 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
They have developed ‘optical tweezers’ and imaging technology that uses lasers to trap tiny microspheres and state-of-the-art cameras to image them. Because the microspheres are caught in the high-intensity focal point, Michael and Arran can move them around, or even make them ‘jump’ from the focal spot of one laser to another.
Because this jumping can transmit matter across biological barriers, the technique means that, working with their collaborators in Rome, the group can study how energy is transferred in certain biological processes that were previously a mystery. By studying in more detail ways that energy is transferred around cells, biologists could potentially develop the ability to conduct new experiments inside cells, and open up potential treatments for diseases.
‘As science advances, we have to find new ways of interacting with very small things, often on the micro- or the nanoscale,’ Professor Padgett says. ‘The optical manipulation technologies that we are working on are at the forefront of where optics meets other sciences and the team here are pioneering exciting futures for nanoscale science and engineering.’
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