Recently, Professor Cao Huang and Professor Jiang Weixiang of Southeast University and Professor Zhang Shuang of Birmingham University published important work in research, a cooperative Journal of Science: an innovative method of enhancing chiral optical signal based on a circular biased Fabry Perot cavity (FP cavity) based on hypersurface.
Chirality, which refers to the asymmetry between an object and its mirror image, plays an important role in the fields of chemistry and biomedicine. It is not only the macromolecules that make up life, such as protein and DNA, which have chirality, but also determine the binding mode of chemicals such as drugs. However, because the size of the chiral molecule is far smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic wave, the response of the chiral optical signal of the natural chiral molecule is very weak, so it needs a high concentration to carry out qualitative and quantitative research.
Focusing on the above key scientific and technological issues, Professor Cao Huang's team innovatively designed a hypersurface structure as a mirror of the FP resonator, so that the circularly polarized light reflected by the hypersurface can still maintain the polarization state when it is incident. By using a pair of orthogonal super surface reflectors to form a FP resonator, circularly reflecting the circularly polarized light in the cavity can be realized, and the chiral response can be accumulated at the same time, thus enhancing the chiral optical signal of the chiral molecules in the cavity. Among them, the super surface mirror is composed of metal mesh / dielectric / metal three-layer structure, and the chiral medium with very weak response to the chiral optical signal in the microwave segment is used instead of the chiral molecule. The theoretical calculation and experimental verification show that the new circularly polarized FP resonator greatly improves the optical activity of the chiral medium and the chiral optical signal by an order of magnitude.
It is worth mentioning that the new method proposed by Professor Cao Huang can be directly extended to higher frequency bands such as visible light, infrared and terahertz, which provides a new idea for the detection of low concentration chiral molecules. This work will effectively promote the development of rapid and accurate identification and separation technology of biomolecule chirality, and provide technical support for rapid detection of virus and research and development of therapeutic drugs.
Cao Huang is currently vice president, professor and doctoral supervisor of College of Optoelectronic Engineering and instrument science. Professor Cao Huang's team has always been focused on the research of micro and nano components and their applications in response to the major national needs. It was supported by talent projects such as "one hundred thousand high-end talents introduction project" - one hundred talents level, one hundred thousand talents project - one thousand talents level, provincial outstanding young scholars, and "star sea outstanding youth".
Research is a world-class scientific and technological journal jointly founded by the Chinese Association for science and technology and the American Association for the promotion of science. It is the first cooperative Journal of science since it was founded in 1880. Editor in chief (China) is Huang Wei, executive vice president of Northwestern Polytechnic University and academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and editor in chief (International) is Cui Tianhong, an outstanding professor at the University of Minnesota.
Text editor: Ma Teng editor in charge: Wang Tianzhuo