Mobile nowadays, in addition to the phone, there is at least a computer, stereo, magazine, payment instrument, television, gaming machine and camera.
In the future, it can also be a high-precision microscope.
So imagine that you zoom in on your finger with a cell phone camera and from there an exciting view opens up of the kingdom of microorganisms thriving on the skin.
This could become a reality if the inventions of the MIT University Technology Research Center in Singapore are embedded into all of our mobile phones.
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A computer program creates a three-dimensional image of the object, i.e. a hologram.
A mobile microscope made possible by the world’s smallest led light source, which the research director Rajeev Ram and his groups developed.
The tiny light source has a diameter of only 400 nanometers, or one millionth of a millimeter. However, it illuminates just as well as much larger LEDs.
The light source was installed in a small holographic microscope that uses no lens at all to detect the object.
In traditional optical microscopes familiar from biology classes, the lenses refract the light rays coming from the sample and magnify the image for our eyes to see.
A holographic microscope, on the other hand, illuminates an object and measures the light reflected from it.
Based on the measurements, the computer program creates a three-dimensional image of the object, i.e. a hologram.
To create the hologram image, the researchers developed a completely new kind of computer program that takes a model from the human brain’s information processing and thus learns.
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With a microscope, you can observe things as small as cells and bacteria.
Led with its software enables the mobile phone camera to be relatively easily converted into a holographic microscope, promise investigator Iksung Kang in the bulletin.
According to the release, such a microscope can detect things as small as cells and bacteria.
Applications of the invention could be various biological sensors that are able to detect what is not visible to the naked eye.
In addition to human tissue samples, the invention could be used to examine, for example, diseases affecting crops.
“In addition to the enormous possibilities of lensless holography, our new LED has a wide range of other possible applications,” says Ram.
According to him, micro-LEDs could be used, for example, in light-controlled medical implants.
The researchers reported on their inventions related to the new type of microscope in two different scientific journals, In Nature Communication and At Optica.
Published in Tiede magazine 7/2023.
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