Yih-Fan Chen

Optofluidic opportunities in global health, food, water and energy.

Optofluidics is a rapidly advancing field that utilizes the integration of optics and microfluidics to provide a number of novel functionalities in microsystems. In this review, we discuss how this approach can potentially be applied to address some of the greatest challenges facing both the developing and developed world, including healthcare, food shortages, malnutrition, water purification, and energy. While medical diagnostics has received most of the attention to date, here we show that some other areas can also potentially benefit from optofluidic technology. Whenever possible we briefly describe how microsystems are currently used to address these problems and then explain why and how optofluidics can provide better solutions. The focus of the article is on the applications of optofluidic techniques in low-resource settings, but we also emphasize that some of these techniques, such as those related to food production, food safety assessment, nutrition monitoring, and energy production, could be very useful in well-developed areas as well.

Angular Orientation of Nanorods Using Nanophotonic Tweezers

Near-field optical techniques have enabled the trapping, transport, and handling of nanoscopic materials much smaller than what can be manipulated with traditional optical tweezers. Here we extend the scope of what is possible by demonstrating angular orientation and rotational control of both biological and nonbiological nanoscale rods using photonic crystal nanotweezers. In our experiments, single microtubules (diameter 25 nm, length 8 μm) and multiwalled carbon nanotubes (outer diameter 110-170 nm, length 5 μm) are rotated by the optical torque resulting from their interaction with the evanescent field emanating from these devices. An angular trap stiffness of κ = 92.8 pN·nm/rad(2)·mW is demonstrated for the microtubules, and a torsional spring constant of 22.8 pN·nm/rad(2)·mW is measured for the nanotubes. We expect that this new capability will facilitate the development of high precision nanoassembly schemes and biophysical studies of bending strains of biomolecules.

Radiation damage effects on the silicon microstrip detector in E789 - A fixed target experiment at fermilab

Abstract A Silicon Microstrip Spectrometer has been installed and successfully operated in experiment E789 at Fermilab. The main physics goal of the experiment is to search for charged particle decays of B and D Mesons. Damage effects due to ionizing radiation exposure to the silicon during the experiment are reported.

Nanomanipulation using silicon nitride photonic crystal resonators

Silicon nitride photonic crystal resonators are designed for manipulating nanomaterials in water using 1064-nm laser. The material of the resonator and the operating wavelength were chosen to minimize thermal heating in the cavity.

Preliminary Results from Fermilab E789

Fermilab experiment 789 studies low‐multiplicity decays of neutral D and B mesons in a high‐rate fixed‐target environment. Preliminary results from the 1991 run are presented.