02/05/2008
  Dr. Simpson's Photonic Nanojet Work Highlighted

"The best of science news" is selected daily for Physics Today's online blogs, and in December it featured a paper about photonic nanojets that was co-authored by ECE Professor Jamesina Simpson.

The paper had been published in the December 10, 2007, issue of Optics Express, the peer-reviewed journal of the Optical Society of America. The issue was focused on microresonators.

The Physics Today blog begins by saying that "Several extraordinary recent achievements place the field of microresonators at the frontier of modern photonics." It then quotes Dr. Vasily Astratov, editor of the Optics Express issue, as saying that "research on microresonators results in 'new physics' and leaves a world of new science to explore."

The blog states: "With recent scientific advances (specifically, the ability to create microresonators with quality (Q) factors in excess of 100 million in chip-scale structures), microresonator research has entered a new era where fundamentally new physical properties and abundant applications are within reach. ...Efforts [include] exploring focusing light in spherical and cylindrical cavities, resulting in a new concept dubbed 'photonic nanojets' that enables biomedical, atmospheric and ocean optics applications....

"A new paper from Northwestern and the University of New Mexico explores new ideas about achieving super resolution using photonic nanojets, potentially for the detection of bio and nanoparticles in applications including cancer detection."

The work that Dr. Simpson co-authored is titled "Subdiffraction optical resolution of a gold nanosphere located within the nanojet of a Mie-resonant dielectric microsphere." Her co-authors are Alexander Heifetz, Soon-Cheol Kong, Allen Taflove and Vadim Backman, all of Northwestern University. Here is a PDF of the paper.

Congratulations, Dr. Simpson.