Have you ever thought of a microscope that’s, well, almost microscopic in size? Well, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have done just that: A microscope that’s made out of tiny liquid water droplets.
Source: Phys.org
When carefully observed, you’ll notice that water droplets are like tiny natural magnifiers. You will be able to see an enlarged and reflected image of your surroundings, as if you’re looking into a crystal ball. These researchers have built on this concept to create “microlenses”, which are formed by complex liquid droplets around the size of the width of human hair.
Each droplet consists of an emulsion of two different liquids, similar to how a few drops of oil look like in a tiny puddle of water. These droplets, even in their simplest form, can magnify images of the surrounding objects; and that’s not all: The researchers have even found a way to reconfigure each droplet’s properties to adjust the way it absorbs, filters, and reflects the light, similar to how a microscope lens can be adjusted to focus.
The scientists combined their skills in chemistry and physics to precisely measure and shape the internal bead and the surrounding droplet to form the liquid complex. This setting acts like a sort of internal lens, just like the way a compound lens in a microscope would work.
Source: Nature Communications, Reconfigurable and responsive droplet-based compound micro-lenses
“We have shown fluids are very versatile optically,” explains athias Kolle, a Brit and Alex d’Arbeloff Career Development Assistant Professor at the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. “We can create complex geometries that form lenses, and these lenses can be tuned optically. When you have a tunable microlens, you can dream up all sorts of applications.” He adds.
For example, he demonstrates that these adjustable microlenses could be used as liquid pixels in a 3D display, able to direct light at an exact angle and project the image depending on which angle the image is viewed at. He also sees the possibility of pocket microscopes which can collect a small drop of blood and pass it over to a series of these liquid droplets. The droplets could capture several images from different perspectives to build a 3D image of each individual blood cell.
“We hope that we can use the imaging capacity of lenses on the microscale combined with the dynamically adjustable optical characteristics of complex fluid-based microlenses to do imaging in a way people have not done yet” Kolle says as he concludes his statement.
Kolle has several other co-authors in this project, namely Sara Nagelberg, Lauren Zarzar, junior Natalie Nicolas, Julia Kalow, Vishnu Sresht, Daniel Blankschtein, George Barbastathis, Timothy Swager, Moritz Kreysing, and Kaushikaram Subramanian. The paper was published in the journal “Nature Communications”.
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