CSSTag: optical nanoscale radar and particle tracking for in-body and microfluidic systems with vibrating graphene and resonance energy transfer

Abstract

Biological particle tracking systems monitor cellular processes or particle behaviors with the great accuracy. The emissions of fluorescent molecules or direct images of particles are captured with cameras or photodetectors. The current imaging systems have challenges in detection, collection, and analysis of imaging data, penetration depth, and complicated set-ups. In this paper, a signaling-based nanoscale acousto-optic radar and microfluidic multiple particle tracking (MPT) system is proposed based on the theoretical design providing nanoscale optical modulator with vibrating Förster resonance energy transfer and vibrating cadmium selenide/zinc sulfide quantum dots (QDs) on graphene resonators. The modulator combines significant advantages of graphene membranes having wideband resonance frequencies with QDs having broad absorption spectrum and tunable properties. The solution denoted by chirp spread spectrum (CSS) Tag utilizes classical radar target tracking approaches in nanoscale environments based on the capabilityto generate CSS sequences identifying different bio-particles. Monte Carlo simulations show significant performance for MPT with a modulator of 10 μm × 10 μm × 10 μm dimension and several picograms of weight, the signal-to-noise ratio in the range from -7 to 10 dB, simple light emitting diode sources with power less than 4 W/cm2 and high speed tracking for microfluidic environments.