Nanoscience & Instrumentation

The lab has a longstanding interest in nanoscience and nanotechnology, and has enabled new perspectives and methods in this area by leveraging control and systems science frameworks. The experimental setup includes customized atomic force microscopes, in-house-realized optical tweezers for leveraging opto-mechanical effects, and advanced TIRF-based microscopy.

Signature contributions include:

• Systems viewpoints of scanning probe microscopy that revealed new insights into nano-interrogation science.
• A fundamental-limits study achieving 0.25 Ångström resolution, with feedback control maintaining the probe within nanometer scale of the sample for more than 30 minutes.
• Transient Force Atomic Force Microscopy — a new imaging method demonstrating that perceived resolution and bandwidth limitations can be overcome, yielding orders-of-magnitude improvement in detection of features on the material being investigated.
• The first real-time method for determining material properties (elasticity and dissipation) at the nanoscale, compatible with topography imaging for soft matter such as polymers and biomaterials.
• Communication-theoretic models for probe-based data storage with unprecedented areal densities, developed in collaboration with IBM Zurich Research Labs.
• Modern control strategies for nanopositioning enabling high-bandwidth probe-based imaging.
• Optical trap methods that double the force resolution achievable with LMI-based control design, while resolving motor-protein motion to better than 8 nm.

These tools are themselves ongoing areas of research and serve as instrumentation for the group’s systems-biology work.