Andres Castellanos-Gomez, a senior scientist at Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid (ICMM), CSIC, has been chosen as one of the experts that write the insights perspectives in the latest Science issue, just published this October, 22. He writes an article with his colleague Jorge Quereda, from Universidad Complutense of Madrid.
Castellanos-Gomez, who is part of the 2D Foundry group, is a researcher focused on the optoelectronic properties of two-dimensional materials such as graphene and molybdenum disulfide. In his group, they use nanofabrication techniques to integrate these two-dimensional materials into optoelectronic devices.
As experts in this field of research, he and his colleague from UCM have been invited by Science to make some comments on Yoon et al.’s paper, which is published in the last issue and presents a design for an ultra miniaturized spectrometer with performance approaching that of benchtop systems. They start from the base that optical spectrometers are very powerful tools for chemical and physical analysis of materials but standard systems are bulky: “Although laboratory benchtop spectrometer systems offer high resolution and wide spectral range, their large size hampers them from being more widely adopted for general consumer products, such as wearable electronics”, they say.
That is why “the miniaturization of spectrometers is crucial to making them cheaper and easier to integrate with other devices, which can help expand the use of such a powerful analytical tool”. At this point, the 2D spectrometer presented by Yoon et al. appears as an interesting tool. Unlike benchtop systems, it is as small as a human skin cell.
“By measuring the photon-generated current at different voltages, the spectrum of the incident light source can be determined with a spectral resolution of 3 nm”, explain Quereda and Castellanos-Gomez. “This is comparable with the resolution of a standard benchtop spectrometer and is unprecedented in spectrometers of this size.”, they add.
From their point of view, “because of the many ways in which their design can be finetuned, the authors predict that it should be possible to create a device that can surpass the already impressive performance of their proof-of-concept device”.
In the article, the researchers explain “the ever-growing need for miniaturized devices” and , the existence of “plenty of market opportunities for integrated micro spectrometers”. “Just as the popularization of digital cameras in mobile phones led to the creation of many unexpected applications, a similar effect may likewise result from the popularization of ultra miniaturized spectrometers”, they argue.
You can read the full article here.
-- Ángela R. Bonachera / ICMM Comunication. Ilustration: Andrés Castellanos-Gómez --
