Sen Yang receives IMS Best Publication Award
Sen Yang, a 4th years Ph.D. student in Interdisciplinary Materials Science from Vanderbilt University, was awarded the 2021 Vanderbilt IMS Best Student Paper Award for his work entitled “Nanoparticle Trapping in a Quasi-BIC System”. The award comes with a $500 prize and a corresponding plaque. This work was completed under the guidance of Prof. Justus Ndukaife of the Vanderbilt University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In this work, the authors demonstrated an all-dielectric nanotweezer capable of trapping nanoscale objects that required low laser powers and thus, resulted in negligible heating. As one of the goals of such nanotweezers is to manipulate biomaterials, low heating to eliminate damage is critical. The authors employed a novel approach involving the introduction of open slots within elliptical nanoresonators to achieve this broad hot-spots and field confinement necessary to trap nanoscale objects. This work has significant promise for chemical sensing, trapping applications. Congrats to Sen and the rest of the authors for this excellent contribution that was just published in ACS Photonics last year (ACS Photonics 2021, 8, 1961−1971).