3:30–4:30 pm Maria Goeppert-Mayer Lecture Hall
How Smart is Your Bathroom? Sensing molecules by Trapping Light to the Atom Scale
Jeremy Baumberg, University of Cambridge
The new era of precision health aims to measure you before you are ill, not after. But no gadgets can yet track the biochemical information contained in our blood, sweat, and tears. We have been developing new nanoscale devices which measure the neurotransmitters in your urine, and asking what it can tell about you, your kids, and your parents. We will discuss the strange optical properties of metals, how to build things at the nanoscale, what spectroscopy tells us about molecules, and talk about how responsible science should progress when it can impact wider society. We will explore these ideas together in demonstrations you should definitely try at home!