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Researchers in Scotland have been given nearly half a million pounds to try to improve digital camera images.
The team, lead by scientists at the University of Glasgow, are developing small nanostructures that would be used on light detecting image sensors.
These new hi-tech chips would be used in camera equipment to produce sharper and more colourful images.
The project is being funded by a £489,234 grant from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council.
We'll be using nanotechnology to manipulate particles... to create a new optical effect Professor David Cumming
The researchers are using a phenomenon called surface plasmon resonance, which is an effect exhibited by certain metals when light waves fall onto their surfaces.
In digital cameras, this is the metal film used on microchip image sensors - known as a CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) - that detect light waves and convert them into digital signals.
When light shines on the metal film, electrons on the surface absorb the energy of the light waves and begin oscillating, or shaking, in groups. The resultant combined waves are called plasmons, and they modify the way light is distributed around the metal. The CMOS then measures the light and assigns it a digital value which is then used to build up the bigger image.
The Scottish scientists hope to find a way of creating patterns or small nanostructures in the metal film on the CMOS. This should increase the sensitivity of the sensor and result in higher quality images.
"We'll be using nanotechnology to manipulate particles, so as to take advantage of the properties of electrons to create a new optical effect," Professor David Cumming of Glasgow University who is leading the research team.
"Digital imaging has come a long way in recent years and this project aims to further improve the ability of digital devices to produce high-quality pictures," he added.
Researchers also want to try and "tune" resonating plasmons into the same frequency as light, which could improve colour discrimination.
The project is expected to last until the middle of 2012.

Water was already beginning to fill the “Grand Canal” of the WaterLights District last week, as Pearland officials and project designers wielded golden shovels to officially break ground for the latest gem on Pearland’s west side.
Part tourist attraction, part upscale address, part shopping and dining magnet, part cutting-edge research center, WaterLights will be home to both Presidential Park and Nano World Headquarters. Colossal sculpture will share space with laboratories specializing in atomic and molecular construction.
“When we started the plans for the WaterLights District….we started looking down the 288 corridor,” said David Goswick, executive director of developer Historical Real Estate, Inc. “We didn’t have to look any further than the gateway to Pearland.”
Developers see WaterLights as a perfect compliment for the area. Up the road a bit, the Houston Medical Center is looking at $3 billion worth of construction in the works, $5 billion more on the boards, and a potential for 30,000 more employees. It just so happens that Pearland’s Westside Zip code, 77584, is home to the largest concentration of Med Center professionals in the Houston area.
WaterLights is located west of 288 and south of Beltway 8. The $700 million, 1.9 million square foot mix-used development is expected to open in September 2009, according to Goswick.
Until now, about all that could be seen of the project were the six giant presidential heads along the 288 access road. As the canal that one day will float the water taxis to ferry shoppers, diners and workers around WaterLights takes shape, those heads will be moved back to their permanent bases in the waterfront park that will become Presidential Park & Gardens.
Developers are still lining up partners for the project’s “restaurant row” and retail sections.
“It’s a challenge to develop any level of real estate at this time,” Goswick said.
Still, the developers are confident in the WaterLights success because of the factor that’s a constant in any real estate venture – location, location, location.
WaterLights has “unbelievable access” with frontage on 288, Kirby and the proposed Spectrum Boulevard, said Richard brown, a Historic Real Estate principal.
Over the past 50 years, Brown has been involved in real estate ventures such as The Woodlands, and the creation of 14 master planned towns such as Flower Mound. Historic Real Estate Inc. “is dedicated to making this site an exemplary one,” Brown said.
Nano World Headquarters will serve as a research center and meeting point for academia, industry and government to explore and pursue nanotechnology development, as well as an incubator and accelerator for startup companies aiming to commercialize the technology. Nanotechnology involves the control and manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular level. Its potential ranges from health care to electronics and energy.
“To move nanotechnology to the next leel is going to require commercialization,” said. Dr. Valerie Moore, executive director of Nano World Headquarters.

A major goal of nanotechnology research is to create a "lab on a chip," in which a tiny biological sample would be carried through microscopic channels for processing. This could make possible portable, fast-acting detectors for disease organisms or food-borne pathogens, rapid DNA sequencing and other tests that now take hours or days.
One obstacle has been the difficulty of moving stuff at the nanoscale. Mechanical pumps don't scale down well. So David Erickson, Cornell assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and colleague Michal Lipson, Cornell associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, have turned to "optofluidics," using the pressure of light to move and manipulate biological molecules.
Now they have shown that a beam of light can trap and move particles as small as 75 nanometers (nm -- a billionth of a meter) in diameter, including DNA molecules -- some of the smallest material ever manipulated by such a system, the researchers said. Their experiments are described in the Jan. 1, 2009 issue of the journal Nature.
This is possible because of the paradoxical dual nature of light. Light can be thought of as a stream of particles called photons that can exert a force, or as waves of expanding and contracting electric and magnetic fields. If light is confined to a waveguide narrower than its wavelength, the wave overflows and can exert a force beyond the guide. Imagine a nanoscale Indiana Jones chased down a nanotunnel by a photon instead of a granite sphere. if Indy climbs into a tunnel above the one in which the photon is moving, he is still being chased because the photon is bigger than its own tunnel.
Erickson and Lipson first cut microfluidic channels in a chip and placed waveguides directly under the channels. In earlier research published in Optics Express (Oct. 15, 2007), the researchers showed that light in the waveguide could move polystyrene spheres about 3 microns (millionths of a meter) in diameter through the fluid-filled channels. But the "evanescent field" of a light wave that extends beyond the waveguide did not extend far enough or carry enough energy to capture and manipulate smaller biological molecules, they found.
So they turned to a new device created by Lipson: a "slot waveguide" -- two parallel silicon bars 60 nm apart, serving as two parallel wave guides. Light waves traveling along each guide expand beyond its boundaries, but because the parallel guides are so close together, the waves overlap and most of the energy is concentrated in the slot. In addition to creating a more intense beam, this structure allows a beam of light to be channeled through air or water.
As a demonstration, graduate students Allen Yang, Sean Moore, Bradley Schmidt and colleagues in Erickson's and Lipson's research groups laid a slot waveguide across a microscopic fluid channel and showed that light from an infrared laser channeled through the wave guide could trap 75-nm diameter polystyrene spheres and comparably-sized DNA molecules out of a stream of water flowing across it. The light in the slot waveguide extends above the slot and exerts a downward force on a particle entering it, pulling the particle down into the slot. Since light pressure then moves the trapped particles along the slot, such a device could be used to separate biological molecules out of a stream and send them somewhere else for processing, the researchers said. Further development, they added, could make it possible to separate DNA molecules by length for rapid DNA sequencing.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, which also supports the Cornell Nanoscale Facility where the devices were manufactured.
Provided by Cornell University

Arizona State University researchers Hao Yan and Yan Liu imagine and assemble intricate structures on a scale almost unfathomably small. Their medium is the double-helical DNA molecule, a versatile building material offering near limitless construction potential.
In the January 2, 2009 issue of Science, Yan and Liu, researchers at ASU's Biodesign Institute and faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, reveal for the first time the three-dimensional character of DNA nanotubules, rings and spirals, each a few hundred thousandths the diameter of a human hair. These DNA nanotubes and other synthetic nanostructures may soon find their way into a new generation of ultra-tiny electronic and biomedical innovations.
Yan and Liu are working in the rapidly proliferating field of structural DNA nanotechnology. By copying a page from nature's guidebook, they capitalize on the DNA molecule's remarkable properties of self-assembly. When ribbonlike strands of the molecule are brought together, they fasten to each other like strips of Velcro, according to simple rules governing the pairing of their four chemical bases, (labeled A, C, T and G). From this meager alphabet, nature has wrung a mind-bending multiplicity of forms. DNA accomplishes this through the cellular synthesis of structural proteins, coded for by specific sequences of the bases. Such proteins are fundamental constituents of living matter, forming cell walls, vessels, tissues and organs. But DNA itself can also form stable architectural structures, and may be artificially cajoled into doing so.
In his research, Yan has been much inspired by nanoscale ingenuity in the natural world: "Unicellular creatures like oceanic diatoms," he points out, "contain self-assembled protein architectures." These diverse forms of enormous delicacy and organismic practicality are frequently the result of the orchestrated self-assembly of both organic and inorganic material.
Scientists in the field of structural DNA nanotechnology, including Dr. Yan's team, have previously demonstrated that pre-fab DNA elements could be induced to self-assemble, forming useful nanostructural platforms or "tiles." Such tiles are able to snap together-with jigsaw puzzle-piece specificity-through base pairing, forming larger arrays.
Yan and Liu's work in Science responds to one of the fundamental challenges in nanotechnology and materials science, the construction of molecular-level forms in three dimensions. To do so, the team uses gold nanoparticles, which can be placed on single-stranded DNA, compelling these flexible molecular tile arrays to bend away from the nanoparticles, curling into closed loops or forming spring-like spirals or nested rings, roughly 30 to 180 nanometers in diameter.
The gold nanoparticles, which coerce DNA strands to arc back on themselves, produce a force known as "steric hindrance," whose magnitude depends on the size of particle used. Using this steric hindrance, Yan and Liu have shown for the first time that DNA nanotubules can be specifically directed to curl into closed rings with high yield.
When 5 nanometer gold particles were used, a milder steric hindrance directed the DNA tiles to curl up and join complementary neighboring segments, often forming spirals of varying diameter in addition to closed rings. A 10 nanometer gold particle however, exerted greater steric hindrance, directing a more tightly constrained curling which, produced mostly closed tubules. Yan stresses that the particle not only participates in the self-assembly process as the directed material, but also as an active agent, inducing and guiding formation of the nanotube.
With the assistance of Anchi Cheng and Jonanthan Brownell at the Scripps Research Institute, they have used an imaging technique known as electron cryotomography to provide the first glimpses of the elusive 3-D architecture of DNA nanotubules. "You quickly freeze the sample in vitreous ice," he explains, describing the process. "This will preserve the native conformation of the structure." Subsequent imaging at various tilted angles allows the reconstruction of the three-dimensional nanostructure, with the gold particles providing enough electron density for crisp visualization. (see movies)
DNA nanotubules will soon be ready to join their carbon nanotube cousins, providing flexible, resilient and manipulatable structures at the molecular level. Extending control over 3-D architectures will lay the foundation for future applications in photometry, photovoltaics, touch screen and flexible displays, as well as for far-reaching biomedical advancements.
"The ability to build three-dimensional structures through self-assembly is really exciting, " Yan says. "It's massively parallel. You can simultaneously produce millions or trillions of copies."
Yan and Liu believe that controlled tubular nanostructures bearing nanoparticles may be applied to the design of electrical channels for cell-cell communication or used in the construction of various nanoelectrical devices.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the Arizona State University

A group of scientists at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has created a process whereby nanotubes can be injected into cells to discover if chemotherapy drugs are reaching their intended destination.
According to information released by the university, the nanotubes are carbon-based tubes that have been covered in DNA so that they can be injected into healthy tissue. The tubes can detect chemotherapy agents as well as toxins in the body.
In a recent statement, Michael Strano, professor of chemical engineering at MIT, said "We've made a sensor that can be placed in living cells, healthy or malignant, and actually detect several different classes of molecules that damage DNA."
In studies done at other universities such as Stanford, scientists found additional ways to use nanotechnology to target cancer cells. One such study found a way for researchers to use nanotubes as "targeted medicinal delivery vehicles" to deliver chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells. This will enable doctors to use less chemotherapy medication and will decrease the severity of side effects.
At the University of California, San Diego researchers also found a new way to use nanotechnology to "bomb" tumors which helps keep surrounding tissue from being affected by the disease. This new treatment seems to keep the cancer from spreading to other areas of the body and causes less damage than other, traditional chemotherapy treatments.
The recent MIT report may prove invaluable in helping doctors monitor cancer patient's progress.
MIT graduate student Daniel Heller said in a statement, "You could figure out not only where the drugs are, but [also] whether a drug is active or not."
The nanotubes in the MIT study work by emitting florescent light which researchers can use to identify various agents within the body. Changes in the light's intensity will allow doctors to determine what they are seeing in the body.
The MIT report also describes the usage of this technology as it relates to antioxidants. Researchers are hopeful it will allow them to better understand how to use chemotherapy drugs.