High throughput STimulated Emission Depletion lithography

Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED)lithography is generally recognized as a very promising tool to overcome the Abbe diffraction limit and manufacture 3D submicron features using a mask-less lithography step. It has been shown to be able to create 100 nm resolution, 10 nm feature size features in a polymer resin. However, STED is not widely...

Monitoring the bio nanomechanical properties of cell structures

Organ-on-chip technology is based on tissues or (stem)cell derived organ mimicking structures and in microfluidic systems. This technology is used to monitor functional response to stimuli, aiming to enable personalized medicine and to conduct pre-clinical drug development studies. In general, cells in stress exhibit a change in nanomechanical...

3D Advance Metrology by means of 3D Atomic Force Microscopy

We developed a new 3D-AFM technique that enables imaging of high aspect ratio trenches. By measuring both lateral and vertical forces on a cantilever tip, a subharmonic mode based on the attractive tip-sample forces becomes feasible. This enables the measurement of true 3D information of samples without causing damage. This is especially...

VIRUSCAN: Identification and characterization of viruses from their nano-mechanical properties

Measuring the nano-mechanical properties of viruses opens a new route to identify viruses and to assess their infectiveness. Current targeted techniques, like PCR, are only suitable for confirmation and have a high false positive rate due to cross contamination and DNA strands presents in the blood sample after former infection. The...

Selenium modified GeTe₄ based glasses optical fibers for far-infrared sensing

This study reports on the synthesis of telluride glasses that have transmission far beyond the second atmospheric window and are stable enough toward crystallisation to be drawn into optical fiber. These glasses are based on the GeTe₄ initial composition which has been stabilized by the introduction of few percents of Se and a...

Telluride glass step index fiber for the far infrared

Nulling interferometry is an important technique under development for the DARWIN planet finding mission which enables the detection of the weak infrared emission lines of an orbiting planet. This technique requires the use of single mode optical fibers transmitting light as far as possible in the infrared. Tellurium based glasses transmit...