Issue 1

Department of Electrical Engineering (EE)

Research

Prof. Wei Jin’s group developed an advanced gas sensing technique

Prof. Wei Jin’s group developed an advanced gas sensing technique - Mode-phase-difference Photothermal Spectroscopy (MPD-PTS), and achieved PPT (parts-per-trillion) detection limit with 8 orders of magnitude dynamic range. This is another 2 orders of magnitude improvement over the state-of-the-art. This impressive work in optical fiber gas sensor has been reported in the journal Nature Communications on 12 February 2020. The reviewer of the journal commented that MPD-PTS is a landmark technique in fiber-optic gas sensing. Also, the MPD-PTS technique was selected by Optical Society of China (OSC) as 中國光學十大進展候選推薦 (2020). Link of the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14707-0

A message from Professor Wei JIN who received the President’s Award for Outstanding Achievement 2019/2020 – Research and Scholarly Activities.

I am grateful to all the members (current and former) of the Photonics Sensors Laboratory (PSL) for their great contributions over the past many years as well as colleagues of Electrical Engineering department and Faculty of Engineering for their generous supports. PSL conducts research on photonic components and sensing systems for measurement of strain, temperature, pressure, refractive index, vibration, acoustic waves, etc. Our current focus is on light-gas interaction in micro- and nano-structured optical fibers, aiming to develop advanced sensors and instrumentation for high performance gas detection.

Prof. Aping Zhang and Prof. Hwa-Yaw Tam developed an optofluidic biochip

Another research team led by Prof. Aping Zhang and Prof. Hwa-Yaw Tam developed an optofluidic biochip with high-quality polymer WGM microlaser sensors for ultrasensitive detection of biomarkers with enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). An in-house optical 3D µ-printing technology is used to rapidly fabricate low-threshold WGM microlasers. The fabricated WGM microlaser sensors were integrated together with optical fibres upon a microfluidic chip and modified in situ with biomolecules for highly selective biomarker detection. It is demonstrated that such an optofluidic biochip enables on-chip optofluidic ELISA of the disease biomarker vascular endothelial growth factor at the extremely low concentration level of 17.8 fg/mL, which is over 2 orders of magnitude better than the ability of current commercial ELISA kits. The work is published in the journal Lab on a Chip (IF: 6.77) and featured on the Front Cover.

Launching of “Teach Your Mates” programme

Being inspired by Professor Edward Chung’s first trial on the Python workshops which lectured by our Ug students, we have launched our ‘Teach Your Mates’ programme in last semester. This programme forms a new platform for our Ug students to experience and learn from something they can share and teach for their fellow classmates. 5 workshops were conducted in the last semester and we are planning to have 2 more to be held in the current semester.