Intellectual Merit: The proposed research will integrate versatile and ultrafast optical sensors with extremely efficient fluid handling techniques into microfluidic chips. These optofluidics chips will perform tasks essential to chemistry and biology, such as mixing, purification, and protein adsorption. These tasks will be executed and monitored at unprecedented frequencies, close to MHz rates. The innovations of the project will be to develop universal integrated sensors with a footprint of a few micrometers, based on state-of-the-art high quality factor optical nanostructured resonators, and to develop fast fluidic mixing based on novel interfacial and segmented flow techniques.
Broader Impact: Remarkable advances in the miniaturization and integration of fluid handling have allowed large-scale integration of thousands of microchannels and valves in so-called microfluidic chips for novel chemical and biological applications, such as particle synthesis and genomic analysis. In current microfluidic chips, the operation frequencies are limited by diffusion-based mixing; also, sensing methods are slow and bulky, many requiring a microscope and visualization setup. The proposed optofluidics chips, integrating high-resolution optical sensors with fast microfluidic capabilities, are expected to contribute significantly to increase the processing power of microfluidic chips, in a similar way that integrated transistors have improved the processing power of microelectronic chips. The educational components of this interdisciplinary research involve theory and numerical design, device micro- and nano-fabrication, as well as fluidic and optical experiments. This program will support two graduate students and summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) activities. It involves cross-boundary topics in Applied Physics, Mechanical, Electrical and Biomedical Engineering. Specific education modules on optofluidics, microfluidics and optical sensors will be developed for K-12 school teachers and presented through two summer workshops for minorities and underrepresented students around the New York metropolitan area, in the Bronx and Harlem.
