Nature Photonics

I used to consider myself an optics jock, but these days, my friends call me "gel monkey" instead, which says a lot about the way my work is going. But, reading Nature Photonics has really made me hanker for my optics jock days. I had no idea this was such a cool journal! A couple of neat articles:

• We had an inquiry about a visit from the Degiorgio lab at the University of Pavia in Italy, and she pointed me to an article of theirs about a new fiber-optic optical tweezer. (Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this is getting indexed by Pubmed, which is a shame, since that's where I go for most of my searching these days.) By using an annular fiber, or a fiber tweezer, they reduce the amount of axial force on the particle (by getting rid of those useless low-NA rays from the middle) and can therefore achieve a much higher effective NA at longer working distances.

• This is a really cool article about using nanofabricated aluminum optical antennas for actively directing radiation from single fluorophores. I seriously had this idea like 10 years ago, after hearing Joe Lackowicz speak about metal-enhanced fluorescence at BPS. At the time, we were trying to directly detect rotation of the S4 segment of voltage-gated potassium ion channels during gating, to follow up on this paper. We were trying to use polarized FRAP, but couldn't get it to work after several years of trying. I thought that another way to detect rotation would be to probe a single molecule with a metal tip, and detect changes in intensity as the dipole rotated with respect to the tip. Anyway, I was ahead of my time, but this looks really neat. In some sense, this is an extension of the optical orientation imaging techniques developed by Robert Dickson and Jörg Enderlein. It's a nice new approach though, and I think it could be highly interesting as it develops.

On an unrelated note, it looks like the Selvin lab (my graduate thesis lab) has finally gotten their optical trap up and running. Hooray! It's been many years in the works.