Dr. Sanli Faez, a postdoctoral researcher from the Leiden Institute of Physics, will present at the Science meets Business cafe a new and exciting technology that has been developed in the Molecular Nano-Optics and Spins department.

Optical microscopy is the most common investigation method in studying cells and its constituents. However, seeing objects that are much smaller than the wavelength of visible light is almost impossible with normal microscopes and one needs more sophisticated methods like confocal, fluorescence or electron microscopy. These techniques are still very expensive and often very slow for measuring the fast dynamics of sub-cellular structures. Dr. Faez and his team have developed an optofluidic single-mode silica fiber that allows detection of single freely-diffusing dielectric particles based on elastic light scattering. Using this low-cost addition to a normal microscope, they have recently detected the faint scattering and fast thermal diffusion of single cowpea viruses with a mass of 4.6 megadaltons at a frame rate of more than 2 kHz.

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