Collaborative Research: Infrared Chiral Metasurface Enhanced Vibrational Circular Dichroism Biomolecule Sensing

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Developing nano-biosensing techniques for the detection and characterization of biomolecules with high sensitivity and selectivity is critically important for food safety and nutrition, biomedical pathogen detection, point-of-care healthcare, early disease diagnostics, and environment monitoring. However, the major challenge for the existing nano-biosensors is to distinguish and identify complex chiral biomolecules with ultrahigh sensitivity, which is highly demanded for rapid protein analysis, early disease detection and real-time monitoring. In this project, a new type of biomolecule sensing platform enhanced by infrared chiral metasurfaces will be developed and demonstrated to detect and identify different types of protein structures, with the advantages of ultrahigh detection sensitivity and high signal-to-noise ratio. This research will benefit many biomedical and photonic applications in early disease diagnosis, pharmaceutical drug discovery, quantum sensing and remote communication. This project also includes educational activities for training graduate students, recruiting underrepresented and female students, and mentoring high school students in outreach programs.Plasmonic nano-biosensors have been widely used for the detection and characterization of biomolecules, where the sensing principle is based on refractive-index induced spectral shift or surface enhanced vibrational absorption. However, it is difficult for these nano-biosensors to identify secondary structures of biomolecules, which usually have similar featureless infrared absorption spectra. The goal of this project is to study a new type of vibrational circular dichroism biosensing platform enhanced by chiral metasurfaces for the detection and identification of protein secondary structures with ultrahigh detection sensitivity and high signal-to-noise ratio. A new chiroptical sensing paradigm will be created relying on the on-resonance interactions between the superchiral near-fields and the vibrational fingerprints of chiral biomolecules. In this project, various types of mid-infrared chiral metasurfaces with high circular dichroism will be designed and analyzed for biomolecule sensing. Nanofabrication processes will be developed to fabricate chiral metasurfaces and integrate the microfluidic cells with protein solutions. The chiral biomolecule sensing platform will be characterized using infrared chiroptical measurements to demonstrate the ultrasensitive identification and detection of protein secondary structures.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.