X. Li, University of Tennessee Space Institute, Tullahoma, TN; W. Hofmeister, UT Space Institute, Tullahoma, TN
In this paper, fabrication of nanofluidics was carried out and the nanofluidics devices were characterized. These devices were used to trap, manipulate and detect single protein molecules in nanometer size channels in the laser fluorescence spectroscopy to investigate dynamical and photophysical behavior of single molecules. On the substrate of fused silica (SiO2) glass wafers, Electron Beam Lithography (EBL) was used to fabricate nanochannels; photolithography method was used to fabricate microchannels as the interface between nanochannels and molecule solution feeding source outside. The microchannels and nanochannels on a glass chip were sealed by a blank chip in a bonding process to fabricate nanofluidics device. We discuss here some preliminary experimental results of nanochannels fabrication and characterization.
Summary: Nanotechnology is the treatment, fabrication, characterization and control of materials at dimensions of roughly 1 to 100 nanometers, where unique materials properties enable novel applications. Among nanotechnology, nanofluidics is one of the numerous Lab-On-A-Chip applications with fluidic channel dimension in nanometer scale. We propose to apply nanofabrication to fabricate a nanofluidics device where single protein molecule can be trapped to yield spectroscopy fluorescence signals when shined by a laser to study detection and manipulation of single molecules. We are working on fabrication and characterization of nanofluidics devices, which has numerous potential applications in medicine research, chemical biology, biophysics, and genomics.
