Transcript – Probing Chirality of Biomolecules with Nano-Structured Laser Light

Hi, I’m Alexei Sokolov, and my poster is about chiral late interacting with Carol Molecule’s, many biological molecules possess a twist otherwise known as CARLETTI, and the direction of this twist is one of the basic mysteries of nature. Turns out light can be chiral, too, and we would like to use kind of light to study chiral molecules. Trouble is, the size of a light beam is much, much larger than the size of a molecule. Even when we use the best microscope objective to focus light that still the size of that focal spot is limited by optical diffraction is microns. And that’s at least three orders of magnitude larger than a nanometer size of a molecule. We call plus Monica Antenna’s to the rescue and we use these metallic structures to receive a signal from an optical beam and to transfer its structure onto the nanoscale, the natural scale of molecules. Well, that’s interesting and counterintuitive, and we have made progress in designing these nonantennas, manufacturing them, using nano fabrication techniques and now testing them using our scanning probe microscopy techniques. The next step is to use a functionalized scanning chip to study the structure of the pulleys, monitor hot spots, see if it’s right, and then put chiral molecules into those hot spots and do spectroscopy of twisted molecules using twisted light. We thank the T-3 program for the support of these initial studies that take us on the way toward the big, exciting goals.