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

在过去几十年里，纳米科学和技术活动的爆炸性增长最重要的结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--由精密工程结构组成的材料--很难制造，并且需要昂贵而复杂的仪器设备。对于许多涉及分子和生物材料的应用来说，这些困难令人望而生畏。用于生物分析的纳米光学技术的发展就是一个很好的例证：现在有一些非常强大的方法可用，它们利用光学活性的等离子体增强和表面增强拉曼散射等现象，使生物检测以非常高的灵敏度成为可能。然而，在社会上(例如，在国家卫生服务中)采用这些方法的潜力是有限的，除非能找到廉价的方法来在大面积上精确制造微型结构。该项目的目标是开发一种快速、廉价的方法来制造金属-生物分子混合结构，从而使这一目标成为可能。我们的初步工作表明，简单的单层化学可以被开发出来，并与干涉技术结合使用--只需要一个激光器和几个透镜--在长度尺度上提供对表面结构的精细控制，精确到几十纳米--接近单个生物分子的尺寸。我们的目标是尝试建造一种能够检测少量DNA的传感器，这可能是一种廉价的基于芯片的筛查技术的基础，这种技术可能会迅速、廉价地引入NHS。

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.