Optical Fiber, Nanomaterial, and THz-Metasurface-Mediated Nano-Biosensors: A Review

The increasing use of nanomaterials and scalable, high-yield nanofabrication process are revolutionizing the development of novel biosensors. Over the past decades, researches on nanotechnology-mediated biosensing have been on the forefront due to their potential application in healthcare, pharmaceutical, cell diagnosis, drug delivery, and water and air quality monitoring. The advancement of nanoscale science relies on a better understanding of theory, manufacturing and fabrication practices, and the application specific methods. The topology and tunable properties of nanoparticles, a part of nanoscale science, can be changed by different manufacturing processes, which separate them from their bulk counterparts. In the recent past, different nanostructures, such as nanosphere, nanorods, nanofiber, core–shell nanoparticles, nanotubes, and thin films, have been exploited to enhance the detectability of labelled or label-free biological molecules with a high accuracy. Furthermore, these engineered-materials-associated transducing devices, e.g., optical waveguides and metasurface-based scattering media, widened the horizon of biosensors over a broad wavelength range from deep-ultraviolet to far-infrared. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the major scientific achievements in nano-biosensors based on optical fiber, nanomaterials and terahertz-domain metasurface-based refractometric, labelled and label-free nano-biosensors.

Imaging Through Random Scatterer with Spatial Coherence Structure Measurement

Optical coherence is becoming an efficient degree of freedom for light field manipulations and applications. In this work, we show that the image information hidden a distance behind a random scattering medium is encoded in the complex spatial coherence structure of a partially coherent light beam that generates after the random scatterer. We validate in experiment that the image information can be well recovered with the spatial coherence measurement and the aid of the iterative phase retrieval algorithm in the Fresnel domain. We find not only the spatial shape but also the position including the lateral shift and longitudinal distances of the image hidden behind the random scatterer can be reconstructed, which indicates the potential uses in three-dimensional optical imaging through random scattering media.