easyNanofab: Large Area Fabrication for Bionanotechnology, Plasmonics and Molecular Nanoscience

在过去的几十年里，纳米科学和技术活动的爆炸式发展的最重要成果可能是出现了强大的新工具，用于以非常高的灵敏度研究和分析材料和分子。然而，这些工具中的许多依赖于纳米结构材料的可用性-由精确工程结构组成的材料-难以制造，并且需要昂贵和复杂的仪器。对于涉及分子和生物材料的许多应用，这些困难是令人生畏的。一个很好的例子是用于生物分析的纳米光学技术的发展：现在有一些非常强大的方法可用，这些方法使用诸如光学活性的等离子体增强和表面增强拉曼散射等现象，使生物检测在非常高的灵敏度下成为可能。然而，除非能够找到廉价的方法在大面积上精确制造微型结构，否则社会（例如，在国家卫生服务中）采用这些方法的潜力有限。该项目的目标是使之成为可能，开发一种快速，廉价的方法来制造混合金属生物分子结构。我们的初步工作表明，可以开发简单的单层化学，并与干涉技术结合使用-只需要一个激光器和几个透镜-提供精细的控制表面结构的长度尺度下降到几十纳米-接近单个生物分子的尺寸。我们的目标是尝试建立一种能够检测少量DNA的传感器，这可能是一种廉价的基于芯片的筛选技术的基础，这种技术可能会在NHS中迅速引入。

Probably the most important outcome of the explosion of activity in nanoscience and technology over the past couple of decades has been the emergence of powerful new tools for studying and analyzing materials and molecules at very high sensitivity. However, many of these tools rely upon the availability of nanostructured materials - materials consisting of precisely engineered structures - that are difficult to make, and require the availability of expensive and complex instrumentation. For many applications involving molecular and biological materials, these difficulties are daunting. A good illustration is the development of nanooptical techniques for biological analysis: there are now some extraordinarily powerful methods available, that use phenomena such as the plasmonic enhancement of optical activity, and surface enhanced Raman scattering, to make biological detection possible at very high sensitivities. However, the potential for uptake of these methodologies in society (for example, in the National Health Service) is limited unless inexpensive methods can be found for the precise fabrication of miniaturized structures over large areas. The goal of this project is to make that possible, be developing a fast, inexpensive approach to the fabrication of hybrid metal-biomolecule structures. Our preliminary work shows that simple monolayer chemistries can be developed and used in conjunction with interference techniques - that require only a laser and a few lenses - to provide exquisite control over surface structure on length scales down to a few tens of nm - approaching the dimensions of single biomolecules. We aim to try to build a sensor capable of detecting small amounts of DNA that could be the basis for a cheap chip-based screening technique that might be introduced quickly an inexpensively in the NHS.