Pearls can provide new information processing options for biomedical and military innovations

Pearls have long been favored as objects of beauty. Now, Purdue University innovators are using the gem to provide potential new opportunities for spectral information processing that can be applied to spectroscopy in biomedical and military applications.

The Purdue team demonstrated light-transport-assisted information processing by creating a pearl spectrometer.

Spectrometers probe the interactions between matter and light as a function of the electromagnetic spectrum and are commonly used in biomedical and military applications. For example, they have been used for diagnostics of various types of cancer and for military gas detection.

“Unfortunately, the widespread uses and practical adaptations of spectroscopy are often limited due to the need for conventional spectrometers,” said Young Kim, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue. “Current spectrometers rely on complex assembly, high-precision alignment devices and large physical dimensions or dimensions, which prevent rapid translation into practical applications.”

The work, funded by the US Air Force Research Laboratory, is published in Nano Letters.

“We found that pearls are an ideal natural object for Anderson’s light localization, named after Nobel laureate Philip Anderson, whose concept has been extended to describe how light resonates in and out of materials due to their strong dispersion, “Kim said.

Yunsang Kwak, a postdoctoral fellow in Purdue’s lab, said, “Anderson’s light localization offers high randomness that is extremely useful for compression detection, particularly for conducting information processing with a factor thin and flat by simply attaching a pearl array of multispectral filters to a conventional camera “.

Kim said: “We don’t think direct use of a pearl would be a good option for mass production of multispectral filter arrays. Instead, pearls teach us how to design Anderson’s messy light-localization nanostructures to develop a new one. spectral information class. processing machine. “

Purdue researchers are seeking their new discovery to provide scientists with an insight into hybridizing material and digital properties that could be useful for breakthroughs in biomedical and defense applications.