Giovanni Volpe awarded with the ERC Proof of Concept Grant

Giovanni Volpe has been awarded with the ERC Proof of Concept Grant for the research project LUCERO: Smart Optofluidic micromanipulation of Biological Samples.

The grant, consisting of 150k EUR, is meant to commercialize the research project LUCERO, providing an innovative method that combines artificial intelligence and optical tweezers to analyze cells easily and inexpensively.

The current technologies for cell analysis have many limitations: they require access to a large number of cells and considerable expertise. The available methods are also labor-intensive and in some cases the cells are destroyed.

The new method developed in LUCERO simplifies the work and lowers the costs of biomedical research by allowing ordinary standard microscopes, which are already in use in biomedical laboratories, to be used to perform the cell analysis.

The method of LUCERO can be used in several areas, from artificial insemination to forensic medicine. It has potentially a large commercial market.

Giovanni Volpe expects that LUCERO will provide around 20 jobs for university-trained experts and researchers within the next five years.

The project LUCERO has already received initial funding and support from two different organizations (Venture Cup and SPIE). Two doctoral students, Falko Schmidt and Martin B. Mojica, are part of LUCERO’s contributors team.

Links:
Press release of the Swedish Research Council: in English, in Swedish.
News on Gothenburg University website: in Swedish.

Gain-Assisted Optomechanical Position Locking of Metal/Dielectric Nanoshells in Optical Potentials published on ACS Photonics

Counter-propagating laser beam intensity, represented and projected on the yz plane.
Gain-Assisted Optomechanical Position Locking of Metal/Dielectric Nanoshells in Optical Potentials
Paolo Polimeno, Francesco Patti, Melissa Infusino, Jonathan Sánchez, Maria A. Iatì, Rosalba Saija, Giovanni Volpe, Onofrio M. Maragò & Alessandro Veltri
ACS Photonics 7(5), 1262–1270 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00213

We investigate gain-assisted optical forces on dye-enriched silver nanoshell in the quasi-static limit by means of a theoretical/numerical approach. We demonstrate the onset of nonlinear optical trapping of these resonant nanostructures in a counter-propagating Gaussian beam configuration. We study the optical forces and trapping behavior as a function of wavelength, particle gain level, and laser power. We support the theoretical analysis with Brownian dynamics simulations that show how particle position locking is achieved at high gains in extended optical trapping potentials. Finally, for wavelengths blue-detuned with respect to the plasmon-enhanced resonance, we observe particle channeling by the standing wave antinodes due to gradient force reversal. This work opens perspectives for gain-assisted optomechanics where nonlinear optical forces are finely tuned to efficiently trap, manipulate, channel, and deliver an externally controlled nanophotonic system.

Ordering of Binary Colloidal Crystals by Random Potentials published on Soft Matter

Ordering of binary colloidal crystals by random potentials

Ordering of Binary Colloidal Crystals by Random Potentials
André S. Nunes, Sabareesh K. P. Velu, Iryna Kasianiuk, Denys Kasyanyuk, Agnese Callegari, Giorgio Volpe, Margarida M. Telo da Gama, Giovanni Volpe & Nuno A. M. Araújo
Soft Matter 16, 4267-4273 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1039/D0SM00208A
arXiv: 1903.01579

Structural defects are ubiquitous in condensed matter, and not always a nuisance. For example, they underlie phenomena such as Anderson localization and hyperuniformity, and they are now being exploited to engineer novel materials. Here, we show experimentally that the density of structural defects in a 2D binary colloidal crystal can be engineered with a random potential. We generate the random potential using an optical speckle pattern, whose induced forces act strongly on one species of particles (strong particles) and weakly on the other (weak particles). Thus, the strong particles are more attracted to the randomly distributed local minima of the optical potential, leaving a trail of defects in the crystalline structure of the colloidal crystal. While, as expected, the crystalline ordering initially decreases with an increasing fraction of strong particles, the crystalline order is surprisingly recovered for sufficiently large fractions. We confirm our experimental results with particle-based simulations, which permit us to elucidate how this non-monotonic behavior results from the competition between the particle-potential and particle-particle interactions.