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Wednesday, 14th October 2009 (504 views)

A particularly sensitive device that could have applications in the field of medicine has been developed by researchers with the aid of nanorods made from gold.

The plasmonic nanorod metamaterial is at least ten times more sensitive than current technologies and is capable of sensing different types of substances - such as drugs and hormones - and their quantity.

It is made primarily from very tiny rods of gold that aid the performance of the device due to the fact that it is very inert and does not interact with biological and other molecules.

The project - which is published in the current issue of Nature Materials - was undertaken by experts from Oregon State University, Queen's University in Belfast, the Universite de Mediterranee in France and the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Canada.

Viktor Podolskiy, associate professor of physics at Oregon State University, said: "This is very exciting. It's an important new application of nanotechnology and the field of metamaterials, and should find some significant uses in medicine, chemistry and physics."

Gold nanorods have previously been used by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrate how they could home in on cancer tumours and destroy them using energy absorbed from near-infrared light.

 

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