The announcement (in 2002) that the death of my favorite source of knowledge and inspiration, and arguably the world’s most prolific science fact and fiction writer (Asimov, >500 books) had been from an HIV infection (contracted during open heart surgery) redirected my laboratory’s efforts to design a means for immediate detection of individual virions in blood. This effort led to the creation of the Whispering Gallery Mode biosensor (WGM). This photonic device was born by an analog with an electronic atom (Photonic Atom), and its sensitivity is accounted for by a heuristic principle, the Reactive Sensing Principle (RSP).



My lecture will trace the evolution of the so-called Whispering Gallery Mode Biosensor from a discovery made in 1995 in my laboratory at the then Polytechnic University (currently NYU-Tandon School of Engineering), and show how the addition of a nano-plasmonic epitope, has pushed its sensitivity beyond individual virions to individual cancer marker molecules, and even single atomic ions. Surprisingly, although the hybrid mode includes a plasmonic nanoshell with an intrinsic loss rate more than 5,000x that of the bare WGM, the hybrid mode produced by coupling the two has a linewidth increased by only ~10% over that of the bare WGM. This is described by a model that combines Coupled Mode Theory (CMT) and the Reactive Sensing Principle (RSP).