Harnessing Plasmonics For Precision Agriculture Worldwide

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Maiken Mikkelsen wants to change the world by developing a small, inexpensive hyperspectral camera to enable worldwide precision farming practices that would significantly reduce water, energy, fertilizer and pesticide use while simultaneously increasing yields. While that goal sounds like a tall task for a simple camera, it's one that has now been greenlighted by a 2019 Moore Inventor Fellowship.

"The Moore Inventor Fellowship is opening a new avenue of research to me," said Mikkelsen, the James N. and Elizabeth H. Barton Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. "It is enabling me to explore new applications for my technology that could benefit the environment and mankind in a profound way, and I am grateful that the Moore Foundation allows me to pursue those."

The cameras most people think of and use every day only capture visible light, which is a small fraction of the available spectrum. Other cameras might specialize in infrared or X-ray wavelengths, for example, but few can capture light from disparate points along the spectrum. And those that can suffer from a myriad of drawbacks, such as complicated machinery that can break, slow functional speeds, bulkiness that can make them difficult to transport, handle by hand or place on drones, and costs that range from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Mikkelsen, however, is working on an approach can be implemented on a single chip, can snap a multispectral image in a few trillionths of a second, and produced and sold for just tens of dollars.

"It wasn't obvious at all that we could do this," said Mikkelsen. "It's quite astonishing actually that not only does this work in preliminary experiments, but we're seeing new physical phenomena that we did not expect that will allow us to speed up how fast we can do this detection by many orders of magnitude."

The physical phenomenon behind Mikkelsen's technology is called plasmonics-the use of nanoscale physical phenomena to trap certain frequencies of light.

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