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A fiber optic nanobiosensor, with sensitivity comparable to commercial plasmonic sensors, a highly reduced sensing area, and the possibility of in-situ use is presented.

Chemical analysis of metabolites directly from cell samples at sub-cellular level in ambient conditions is essential to understand the biochemical pathways in these organisms. In order to achieve this goal we combine near-field ablation with mass spectrometry. As a first step towards the integration of near-field ablation with mass spectrometry, we will report preliminary results of the chemical analysis of Arabidopsis Thaliana.

As the initial experiments towards integrating the near-field ablation and a fiber-optic biosensor, we report the near-field ablation on Arabidopsis thaliana leaf samples with a 2μm ablation spot. We also report time-dependent spectral plots of detecting biomolecules in the ground Arabidopsis leaf solution. The sensitivity of detecting biomolecules with amino functional groups was improved by using a biosensor coated with a specific type of cross linkers.

We describe a laser vibrometer that is capable of making 256 simultaneous point measurements along a line. The ability to make simultaneous measurements is significant because in the case of multi-frequency or transient vibration modes it allows the measurement of vibration phase as well as vibration amplitude. For many applications such measurements cannot be obtained by any other means, and are of great interest to vibration engineers. In its present form, the vibrometer has a measurement bandwidth of 100 kHz, and measures displacements with a resolution of /spl lambda//25.