Description:
Analytical Nanoscope on a Chip for Sub-Optical Resolution Imaging
NJIT Case No. 16-038
Inventors: Arooj Aslam, Alokik Kanwal, Reginald Farrow
Intellectual Property & Development status: US Patent protection is pending.
NJIT is currently seeking commercial partners for the further development and commercialization of this opportunity.
Technology Brief:
Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology in the Department of Physics have invented an imaging device that requires no traditional optics instead uses an addressable array of vertically oriented carbon nanotubes.
A traditional optical microscope uses a combination of lenses to project light onto a sample and magnify the resulting image. These microscopes require a large numerical aperture and high light in order to obtain very high resolution, which limits both the field of view and the depth of focus. Traditional optical microscopes generally have poor resolution, require too complicated equipment, and occupy a lot of space and are not portable. This invention overcomes the drawback of traditional optical microscope by using an addressable array of vertically oriented carbon nanotubes. This device uses the technique of the ability to reduce the nearest neighbor spacing between the carbons nanotubes to less than the wavelength of light used in traditional optical microscopes. The device derives spatially resolved dielectric and chemical properties of a sample to be imaged.
Applications
• Histopathology
• Smear tests
Advantages
• Compact
• Portable
• High Resolution
• Requires no light
• Requires no complicated equipments
Inventors Bio:
Reginald Farrow, is a Research professor in the Department of Physics at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Following a 25-year career at Bell Laboratories, investigating materials and developing nanofabrication for advanced devices, Farrow joined NJIT in 2004 as part of the biophysics and materials science programs in the department of physics. His team includes people with expertise in biophysics, chemistry, biology, biomedical engineering, materials science, and electrical engineering.
While at NJIT, his federal research grants have funded eight faculty, three postdoctoral fellows, nine graduate students and five undergraduates. Sources have included the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center. Farrow was President and Conference Chair of the 2012 International Symposium on Electron, Ion, and Photon Beams and Nanofabrication. He has published over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals and proceedings, given 14 invited talks and received 11 patent awards, four while at NJIT.
He holds a BS in Physics from the University of Rochester, a Master’s in Physics from Rutgers University and a PhD in Physics from Stevens Institute of Technology.