Jerome Wenger NanoBioPhotonics

Back from last week’s science festival in downtown Marseille, where we had a quite nice success in presenting optics.

The photos can be seen at :

http://s306.photobucket.com/albums/nn245/jwkl67/FdS2008/?albumview=slideshow

Published in September 15^th issue of Optics Express :

http://oe.osa.org/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-16-19-15297

It’s the first experimental and theoretical report of a new effect : the 3-axis subwavelength confinement of light by a high refractive index microsphere. Freely available for download !

Abstract: Latex microspheres are used as a simple and low-cost means to achieve three axis electromagnetic confinement below the standard diffraction limit. We demonstrate their use to enhance the fluorescence fluctuation detection of single molecules. Compared to confocal microscopy with high numerical aperture, we monitor a detection volume reduction of one order of magnitude below the diffraction limit together with a 5-fold gain in the fluorescence rate per molecule. This offers new opportunities for a broad range of applications in biophotonics, plasmonics, optical data storage and ultramicroscopy.

Paris September 29^th – October 2^nd, several talks related to my work are planned :

• 09/29 TOM1 12:50 : J. Wenger et al  “Dielectric microspheres to enhance single molecule fluorescence detection”
• 10/01 TOM4 13:50 : P. Ferrand et al  “Direct observation of photonic nanojets”
• 10/01 TOM3 16:45 : P. Schoen et al  “Nonlinear SHG enhancement in isolated metal nanoapertures”
• 10/01 TOM4 16:45 : A. Devilez et al  “Beaming light with a single dielectric microsphere”
• Poster TOM4 677 : D. Gérard et al  “Single-molecule fluorescence in subwavelength apertures: enhanced emission and photokinetics alteration”

More at : http://www.europeanopticalsociety.org/EOSAM_2008

Back to the source…

Taken from ISI Web of Knowledge, here are the latest ranking for France and CNRS in physics.

If we just compare the total number of papers published, the froggies are not performing too bad, contrarily to what our government seems to say…