It’s winter virus season. If you’ve never succumbed to a bad mood yourself, chances are you know someone. We’re used to the idea of testing for COVID by now, but it’s not always easy to get your hands on test kits.
But what if there was a device that could tell you for sure whether your runny nose was caused by COVID-19, the flu, or something else? What if it could tell you about other health conditions you didn’t know you had?
This may sound like science fiction, but it could soon become a reality thanks to new research by a team from Norway and the United States.
A key component of the technology that can be used to generate optical sensors accurate enough to diagnose disease is called a whispering gallery microresonator. In this case, the task of the microresonator made of germanium is to store the optical field within a small space. They are usually about the thickness of a human hair.
This is where the idea for the ‘whispering gallery’ comes from. The famous Whispering Gallery in St Paul’s Cathedral in London is a good example. Here, words can be whispered on one side of the 42-meter (137-foot) circular dome and heard clearly on the other. Similarly, when light traveling in a microresonator moves in a circular motion, the optical field is amplified.
Microresonators themselves have been around for some time, but what the team has achieved with their new work is a significant improvement in technology. It’s about 100 times better than ,” first author Dingding Ren said in a statement.
“We have constructed a minimal-loss whispering gallery-mode microresonator for the longwave infrared spectrum. will bring.”
The new microresonator retains light much longer than previous versions, opening up many new possibilities for using this technology. The researchers wrote in their study: [longwave infrared spectrum] became feasible. ”
One potential application is the development of broadband optical frequency combs. These are converted lasers that operate across a spectrum of discrete frequencies and are found in atomic clocks, fiber optic instruments, and GPS. The creators of the frequency comb shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics.
If researchers could develop a broadband frequency comb in the longwave infrared spectrum, it would be possible to analyze several different chemicals simultaneously.
“The technology is still in its infancy when it comes to measuring the longwave infrared spectrum of light. However, our improvements will allow us to identify several different chemicals in real time in the near future,” says Ren. continues Mr.
Importantly, these advances could make this technology more affordable. Spectrometers exist that can analyze multiple chemicals at once, but they are only available to high-budget laboratories and hospitals.
“The fact that it is now possible to measure with long wavelength IR [infrared] Scope … opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of use in imaging and detection, environmental monitoring, and biomedical applications,” summarized Astrid Aknes of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who advised on the project.
As the field continues to develop, it may not be long before our dream of a vague detector at home becomes a reality. But for now, I’ll pass the tissue.
The research is published in Nature Communications.
