CAN PEARLS PROVIDE NEW BIOMEDICAL INSIGHTS?

HOW ARE PEARLS INNOVATING BIOMEDICAL SPACES?

What secrets do pearls, like seen in this ring, hold for researchers?

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WHAT IS SPECTROSCOPY?

What the Purdue team has done is demonstrate light transport-assisted information processing. They did this by creating a pearl spectrometer.

Purdue University innovators are using pearls to provide potential new opportunities for spectral information processing that can be applied to spectroscopy in biomedical and military applications. Image Credit: Purdue University

A spectrometer probes interaction of matter and light as a function of the electromagnetic spectrum. Common applications exist in both the biomedical and military fields. We use them for detecting cancer and for sensing gasses.

“Unfortunately, widespread uses and practical adaptions of spectroscopy are often limited due to the need of conventional spectrometers,” said Young Kim, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue. “The current spectrometers rely on complex device assembly, high-precision alignment and large physical size or dimension, all of which prevent rapid translation into practical applications.”

“We discovered that pearls are an ideal natural object for Anderson localization of light, named after Nobel laureate Philip Anderson, whose concept has been extended to describe how light undergoes on and off resonances inside materials due to their strong scattering,” Kim said.

Yunsang Kwak, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab at Purdue, said, “Anderson light localization offers high randomness that is extremely helpful for compressive sensing, in particular to conduct information processing  with a thin and plat form factor, by simply attaching a pearl-like multispectral filter array on a conventional camera.”

Kim said, “We do not think that the direct use of a pearl would be a good option for mass production of multispectral filter arrays. Instead, pearls teach us how to design disordered nanostructures of Anderson light localization to develop a new class of spectral information processing machine.”

This discovery may provide scientists with an idea of combining material and digital properties, which could provide innovations to biomedical and defense applications.