About the project
This PhD project aims to apply frontier advancements in optomechanics to the biosensing and diagnostic fields with the goal to advance optomechanics, mass spectrometry analytics and biophysics towards clinical applications and the fundamental understanding of complex biochemical processes such as the detection of chiral molecules and their relevance for molecular functionalities.
Bio-diagnosis demand is on novel, affordable, and rapid technologies to overcome current limitations. The gold standard, mass spectrometry (MS), detects the charge-to-mass ratio (q/m) of molecules but cannot distinguish between infectious or activated molecular states that share the same chemical composition but differ in conformation or chirality. These structural differences, crucial in defining whether a molecule is harmful or harmless, appear identical in MS signals. Detecting the polarizability-to-mass ratio (p/m) can reveal such topological distinctions.
Quantum optomechanics—pioneering advances from gravitational wave detection to quantum systems studies—offers a transformative opportunity for biosensing. In particular, levitated optomechanics enables ultra-sensitive detection by monitoring shifts in the optical trap frequency caused by minuscule changes in a nanoparticle’s dielectric properties. Recent work has shown that oligonucleotide (DNA strand) molecules attached to a 100 nm levitated silica nanoparticle produces a measurable signal, demonstrating unprecedented molecular sensitivity (see for more details: Wilson, T., Rackham, O.J., & Ulbricht, H. (2025). Oligonucleotide selective detection by levitated optomechanics. arXiv:2507.17940).
This PhD project will develop an optomechanical biosensor capable of characterizing biomolecules through their polarizability (p) and mass (m), providing conformational and chiral insight beyond MS capabilities. The work involves chemical preparation of analytes, optical trapping, instrument optimization, and machine learning–based data analysis. A key focus will be automation to accelerate sample handling and detection for defence and clinical applications. The device already surpasses MS in compactness, and the PhD will advance its miniaturization and throughput to enable clinical use.
