WFU Physics Colloquium

TITLE: Threading the Needle: Solid-State Nanopores for Biomolecule Detection and Characterization

SPEAKER: Professor Adam Hall,

TIME: Wednesday February 27, 2013 at 4:00 PM

PLACE: Room 101 Olin Physical Laboratory

Solid-state nanopores represent an exciting young technology for molecular detection. Here, a nanometer-scale aperture is fabricated in a thin solid-state membrane and used as a portal through which individual molecules can be threaded one at a time. By monitoring the electronic signature of each translocation event, characteristics of the individual molecules that pass can be ascertained. In this talk, I will give an introduction to the system and then discuss several recent results, including detection of local protein structure along DNA molecules and direct force measurements performed with a combination optical tweezer-nanopore instrument. I will also describe a new fabrication technique that we have developed that uses a focused helium ion beam to make these devices quickly and at high resolution.