A-Lab@Rice

Congratulations to Andrea and Keith! A great work on modeling how energy is transferred from the electromagnetic field to molecules. Published on ACS Nano:

Congratulations to Dr. Narmada Naidu (now at EPFL) for the excellent work!

Light can be absorbed in nanoparticles to locally generate heat and thermally ablate tumors. We have developed a comprehensive modeling approach for optimizing this Nanoparticle Assisted PhotoThermal Therapy to maximize damage to the tumoral regions while minimizing treatment time and preserving healthy tissues.

Optimization strategies include choosing precise nanoparticle concentrations and adopting specific spatiotemporal modulation of the input illumination.

You can find more information and details in our paper published in ACS Photonics:

Routes to Optimizing Photothermal Cancer Therapy through a Comprehensive Theoretical Model

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsphotonics.4c00491

 

It was great to teach with colleagues Prof. Raudel Avila (MECH), Prof. Eleonora Bartoli (Baylor College of Medicine and adj. Rice ECE) and my student Will Schmid the Summer School:

Selected Topics in Computational Engineering for Scientific Challenges of the 21st Century: From Bioelectronic Devices to Solar Desalination Systems

hosted by the Department of Electronic Engineering of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia!

We have simulated electrical conductivity maps to reproduce intracranial electrophysiology data to investigate neural pathways in the human brain.

The research has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods.

A biophysically constrained brain connectivity model based on stimulation-evoked potentials.

See the full article here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsphotonics.2c01251

The work in collaboration with Paris Saclay University and La Sapienza in Rome, has been published in ACS Nano.

We have demonstrated a thermal transducer capable to detect strong light-matter interaction by monitoring heat dissipation in a quantum well sandwiched between an antenna and a thermally expanding material.

The result is interesting because the technique does not rely on far-field analysis (often difficult to achieve) and also opens the way to exploit dissipative dynamics in cavity-embedded quantum systems.

See more: https://pubs.acs.org/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1021/acsnano.2c04452&ref=pdf

Many processes depend superlinearly on light intensity (that is: two photons are more than twice as better as one). This work shows how to efficiently design lossless ultrathin dielectric optical metasurfaces to achieve extremely large light intensities. The concept can benefit nonlinear optical processes such as photothermal catalysis, light-driven desalination or higher-harmonics generation.

Interestingly, we also show that sometimes it is better to give up some input power (i.e., lose some energy) if that translates into more local field intensities.

Thanks to Yage Zhao and Ming Zhang and great collaboration with Nordlander’s group

Fast Topology Optimization for Near-Field Focusing All-Dielectric Metasurfaces Using the Discrete Dipole Approximation