Nanoseminar 22 October - dr. Itır Bakış Doğru Yüksel

Speaker: dr. Itır Bakış Doğru Yüksel

Title: Self-Assembled Biomaterial Lasers

Abstract: Ever since their first demonstration by Theodore Maiman in 1960, lasers have had an enormous influence on our life. Laser light is coherent in space and time, directional and its spectrum is tunable. With their unique emission properties, lasers have a broad range of applications including barcode readers, blu-ray players, high-resolution imaging, and fiber-optic communication. Moreover, their use is emerging in biomedical imaging, diagnosis, and surgery. Commonly, lasers are fabricated using artificial or inorganic materials, however, these lasers are not proper to interface with living systems such as cells and tissues.

As a solution, in this research, we fabricated biomaterial-based lasers (biolasers) made of biocompatible materials of proteins and biopolymers using the self-assembly methods. This talk focuses on the demonstration of unconventional cavities for biolasers motivating by the coffee-stain effect. First, I will talk about whispering gallery mode biolasers using silk fibroin protein and synthetic biopolymers. No tools, components, and/or human intervention are needed after the construction process is initiated. I will describe the suppression of the coffee stain effect to fabricate disk lasers that are flexible, physically transient, and can be directly integrated on a variety of substrates. Next, the transition of the 2D coffee stains into the 3D hollow spheroid structure and their use as spheroid cavities will be discussed.

Second, the use of cracks as self-assembled random lasers will be presented. Directional random lasers with high Q-factors will be shown using a wide variety of materials including fluorescent proteins, silk fibroin, silica nanoparticles, and synthetic biopolymers.

Our findings introduce an innovative way of fabricating biocompatible and biodegradable lasers. This research generates the foundation of the advances of biolasers that are implantable to living systems.