White light spectroscopy for rapid quality control in nano imprinted sensors
Smart Nano NI has been shortlisted for the 2025 ElectroOptics Photonics Frontiers Award. The Group’s entry, led by Smart Nano Research Fellow Mike Hardy Queen’s University Belfast School of Maths and Physics, focuses on the Consortium’s recent efforts to use spectroscopy for quality in control in nanostructured sensors.
Mike said, ‘We’re delighted to be considered for this year’s award. It is a credit to the whole Smart Nano team, including our company partners and external collaborators. The award shortlist is testament to all the hard work everyone has been putting into the project, right from the get-go, when the lab was essentially an empty space with only one or two 3D printers.’
The specific project named in the entry spans various aspects of science, including nanofabrication, materials science, biosensing, electromagnetic modelling, and machine learning.
‘A lot of the aspects of our study are very familiar to many researchers’, Mike continued, ‘for instance, nanoimprint lithography is a very common fabrication technique, and principal component analysis is a popular unsupervised machine learning algorithm for discovering patterns in one’s datasets. However, what really sets us apart is the broad and collaborative nature of our scientific investigation. Exploring different areas of science, and combining them, through collaboration with academic and industry partners, has been very useful.’
The Team attributes the ease for large-scale collaboration to the nature of the Smart Nano NI Project and the UKRI Strength-in-Places funding scheme. ‘It’s certainly allowed us the scope and flexibility to do the best research that we can, and hopefully bring some of this nano-sensing technology closer to real-world adoption quicker’, Mike added.
‘Having cheap, scalable sensing chips, which are portable, and provide proper quantification across a wide range of concentrations, could prove transformative in many different real-world application areas, from liquid biopsy healthcare, food safety, and explosives detection. Further, we think it might coincide well with developments in the global portable spectrometer market which is expected to continue to thrive’, he concluded.
The work also features some more novel work on nano-thermal mapping measurements with a modified atomic force microscope, led by Queen’s PhD student Serene Pauly, from the co-located Photonic Integration and Advanced Data Storage (PIADS) Centre for Doctoral Training. The set-up permitted temperature measurements on the nano-scale. Called, Scanning Thermal Microscopy, the technique allowed the group to monitor the robustness of their nano-dome structures under different levels of local heating.
The lab is now exploring ways to dice and package nano-chips, like those used in the study, with robotics in the Smart Nano lab for sensing devices.
Members from Smart Nano NI will be at Laser World of Photonics in Munich in June, if interested in their work please feel free to drop a line to a member of the team!
Contact: Mike Hardy (m.hardy@qub.ac.uk)
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White light spectroscopy for rapid quality control in nano imprinted sensors | Electro Optics
[Photo: Mike Hardy (middle) with collaborators on the project, scanning probe microscopist Serene Pauly (left, PIADS Centre @ Queen’s Belfast & Uni. of Glasgow) and optical physicist Dr Katie Cavanagh (right, Yelo Ltd)]