The detection of trace gases is crucial in environmental monitoring, industrial safety, and medical diagnostics. Optical sensing technologies, particularly those leveraging photothermal spectroscopy, offer high sensitivity and selectivity, enabling the identification of gases based on their unique absorption spectra. Among these, photothermal interferometry offers exceptional sensitivity due to its use of an interferometric signal transducer. […]
The ability of a sensor to provide stable and reliable response while operating in harsh environments is crucial for many applications. It is highly dependent on the composition of the material constituting the sensor. In this work, we investigated the 3D printing of three types of materials to evaluate their performance for temperature and pressure […]
Imaging the structure and observing the dynamics of isolated proteins using single-particle X-ray diffractive imaging (SPI) is one of the potential applications of X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). Currently, SPI experiments on isolated proteins are limited by three factors: low signal strength, limited data and high background from gas scattering. The last two factors are largely […]
Humidity sensors are used in many applications. The design of fast sensors that can operate in explosive environments is a difficult task. Therefore, current research efforts aim at combining reliability, sensitivity and high sensing speed. The use of structured ultrathin hydrogels perfectly meets these requirements. Nanostructures are directly fabricated with a two-photon-polymerisation (2PP) 3D printer […]
Gallium liquid metal alloys (GLMAs) such as Galinstan and gallium–indium eutectic (EGaIn) are interesting materials due to their high surface tensions, low viscosities, and electrical conductivities comparable to classical solid metals. They have been used for applications in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and, more recently, liquid metal microfluidics (LMMF) for setting up devices like actuators. However, […]
The rheological characterization of soft suspended bodies, such as cells, organoids, or synthetic microstructures, is particularly challenging, even with state-of-the-art methods (e.g. atomic force microscopy, AFM). Providing well-defined boundary conditions for modeling typically requires fixating the sample on a substrate, which is a delicate and time-consuming procedure. Moreover, it needs to be tuned for each […]
