|
Cavity-Enhanced Absorption Spectroscopy of BChla |
|
|
|
|
Written by Dirk Englund
|
|
Friday, 09 March 2007 |
0
Caltech, Senior Thesis Project (2001-2002)
The goal here was to develop a non-intrusive way to observe single bio-molecules. To avoid fluorescent tags, which always alter the behavior the molecule in some way, we rely on absorption spectroscopy. However, the absorptoin of a single molecule is extremely small and difficult to measure. The way around it is to put the molecule inside an optical cavity, which confines the probe light and amplifies its interaction with the molecule. The paper shows that it should be possible to observe single molecules with a high-Q (low-loss) optical cavity. In this project, we were not able to reach the single-molecule, but we were able to observe ~10,000-100,000 molecules in a high-Q, liquid resonance cavity. 
I built a high-finesse resonance cavity to for enhanced absorption spectroscopy on BChl-a. The bigger picture is that such a cavity-enhanced technique could allow observation of molecular conformational changes on the single-molecule level. Here's my senior thesis on the subject: Thesis on Cavity-Enhanced Absorption Spectroscopy
|
|
Last Updated ( Thursday, 26 July 2007 )
|
