Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Nanoaperture based optical tweezers allow for trapping nanoparticles down to the single digit nanometer size. This has applications in biophysics and quantum emitters. For biophysics, the main applications is to study proteins and their interactions, with anticipated impact on the drug discovery industry, but also to advance single molecule biophysics. For quantum emitters, the technique allows for studying colloidal emitters (including perovskite quantum dots, lanthanides in nanocrystals, transition metal dichalcogenide nanoflakes) and their interactions with the goal of achieving single photon sources for the quantum information industry and studying quantum interactions between such emitters (such as resonant energy transfer). Over the last 6 years, the Discovery Grant research program has been successful in deterministically isolating single Er ion emitters, which we aim to use as quantum light sources. It has also been successful in studying the dynamics of proteins and their interactions with small molecules which has attracted collaborations from drug discovery industry and top international research groups (such as the Human Frontiers Science Program Grant including Itzhaki of U. Cambridge and Bahar of U. Pittsburgh). The goal over the next 5 years of the program will be to: 1) achieve indistinguishable single photon sources at low loss telecom wavelengths (1550 nm) that are fiber coupled, and 2) study protein dynamics at the picosecond to nanosecond timescale at the single molecule level. This will require us to develop entirely new capabilities for the technique by creating new setups with ultrafast and with cryogenic capability, as well as augment the detection end with high speed imaging detection and quantum detection (second order statistics and indistinguishability analysis). Graduate students trained in this program will learn in a diverse research environment benefitting from international collaborators in chemistry, pharmacology and biochemistry, as well as an extensive research network and outstanding faciltiies available at the University of Victoria. The longer term goal of this research program is to find overlap between the two research themes enabled by the nanoaperture tweezer program to explore the possibility of "quantum biology". "Quantum biology" asks the question: are quantum processes exploited and/or essential in biological systems? Many model systems have been proposed in this space, and there has been ongoing controversy over the results and their interpretation. Our particular interest lies in the vibrational modes of proteins and whether they exploit quantum tricks to operate efficiently at physiological temperatures and in a crowded environment. This is a very risky research area, but it attempts to answer one of the most fundamental questions about the nature of life.