CAREER: Instrument Development of Plasmonic-Assisted Nanomechanical Detection for Polarized Spectroscopy and Imaging

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With this project, supported by the Chemical Measurement and Imaging program in the Chemistry Division, Professor Laurene Tetard and her students in the Department of Physics and the NanoScience Technology Center at the University of Central Florida are studying important molecular structures of living systems at the nanoscale. Using polarized infrared light to enhance the capabilities of a method known as Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), the Tetard group is able to observe the chemical and structural properties of single molecules and their assemblies. The new approach can evaluate the orientations and crystallinity of systems which cannot be studied with conventional tools, enabling deeper understanding of important processes in chemistry, food science, catalysis, environmental science, forensics, and biology. The team is also generating educational materials to communicate the concepts and relevance of its research activities through a series of workshops offering hands-on and project-based activities. A diverse group of students is engaged in the conception and execution of the workshops, with an aim of inspiring participants (including women and underrepresented minority students) to pursue careers in STEM. Living systems and their components, such as nucleic and amino acids, can present complex structural arrangements, such as chirality. Despite the important relationship between the structure and function of these unique self-assembled structures, standard analytical tools are deficient in probing low concentration, single molecular processes or rare events. Dr. Tetard is developing and evaluating a new approach to nanoscale polarized infrared spectroscopy to enable identification of molecular chirality in complex systems, and to further establish means to monitor specific dynamic structure-activity relationships associated with these systems. The approach utilizes light polarization and field enhancement for nanomechanical AFM detection. The performance of the platform is being tested on several molecules of importance in life sciences. Additional efforts target time-resolved monitoring of changes in molecular twists. The educational component involves developments at the forefront of nanoscale science in rich project-based activities for a series of workshops in the US and abroad. Resulting hands-on and project-based activities will be made publicly available for teaching laboratories.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.