Researchers from Tel Aviv University have developed a sensor consisting of a chip carrying billions of nanometer sensors, each of which is a kind of thin silicon hair, coated with the material that reacts with a certain type of explosive.
Almost every substance scatters around it individual molecules that float in the air around us. Explosives also leave such a fingerprint, but their detection is not simple, because these are individual molecules in air that also contains many molecules of many other substances. Now researchers from Tel Aviv University have developed a unique detector that may solve the problem. It consists of a chip that carries billions of nanometer sensors, each of which is a kind of thin silicon hair, coated with a material that reacts with a certain type of explosive. Because of the tiny scale of these sensors, link of a few molecules of an explosive already changes the electrical conductivity of the sensor. This allows the system to know quite precisely how many molecules have been attached to the entire device, and deduce their concentration. Since each such detector includes hundreds of sensors for each type of explosive, the device is also less prone to malfunctions than other detectors (based on a single sensor), sensitive to even the smallest concentrations of explosive in the air - several orders of magnitude more than any detection dog, say the researchers - and is able to weigh the information from all the sensors and transmit to its operators information about the type of explosive and its concentration. The researchers sold the rights to the development to a commercial company, tracense, and it is currently testing it to make the detector a commercial product. "We expect that in a year these detectors will already be in use," says Prof. Fernando Patolsky, head of the development team. "It is difficult to estimate the market value of the detector, until So far there was no detector with such capabilities, but I estimate that we will create a new market of different apps and applications, a market whose value could reach billions of dollars." Petulsky and his colleagues estimate that it is possible that within a year the detector will already be offered for commercial marketing.
Explosives detection is indeed a very important development, and it pays off financially, but the sensing technology developed in Prof. Petulsky's laboratory can be adapted to a wide variety of other applications. "With other materials on the detectors, these detectors can be used to detect drugs, biological materials to diagnose diseases, materials that emit bacteria or insects, agricultural, medical, security and environmental applications. The sky is the limit," Petulsky says. Today, a method is being developed in his laboratory for the very early diagnosis of cancer, through the ability to absorb and identify extremely low concentrations of certain substances. They are also trying to develop a personal test of the effectiveness of the treatment, that is, to examine in a particular patient which medicine achieves the most effective results in the fight against the tumor.
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