Scientists Build First Self-Illuminating Biosensor

Self-lighting chip uses quantum tunneling to spot a trillionth of a gram

Imagine detecting a single trillionth of a gram of a molecule—like an amino acid—using just electricity and a chip smaller than your fingernail. That’s the power of a new quantum-enabled biosensor developed at EPFL. Ditching bulky lasers, it taps into the strange world of quantum tunneling, where electrons sneak through barriers and release light in the process. This self-illuminating sensor uses a gold nanostructure to both generate and sense l…

Scientists build first self-illuminating biosensor

Optical biosensors use light waves as a probe to detect molecules, and are essential for precise medical diagnostics, personalized medicine, and environmental monitoring.

Plasmonic biosensor enabled by resonant quantum tunnelling

Metasurfaces provide an ideal platform for optical sensing because they produce strong light-field confinement and enhancement over extended regions that allow us to identify deep-subwavelength layers of organic and inorganic molecules. However, the requirement of using external light sources involves bulky equipment that hinders point-of-care applications. Here we introduce a plasmonic sensor with an embedded source of light provided by quantum…

Illuminating the complexity of GPCR pathway selectivity – advances in biosensor development

It should come as no surprise that G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) continue to occupy the focus of drug discovery efforts. Their widespread expres…

EPFL scientists build first self-illuminating biosensor - Scientific Inquirer

Optical biosensors use light waves as a probe to detect molecules, and are essential for precise medical diagnostics, personalized medicine, and environmental monitoring. Their performance is dramatically enhanced if they can focus light waves down to the nanometer scale – small enough to detect proteins or amino acids, for example – using nanophotonic structures that ‘squeeze’ light at the surface of a tiny chip. But the generation and detectio…

Study of dielectric modulated dual source triple gate TFET for biosensing applications

A dielectric modulated dual source triple gate tunnel field effect transistor (DM-DSTG TFET) based biosensors is proposed for the detection of biomolecules, with its performance characteristics rigorously evaluated using the Silvaco Atlas simulator. The dual source is positioned within the two...