The overall study aims at cardiovascular diseases (CVD), which remain the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The high mortality is mainly caused by coronary atherosclerosis and associated stroke. This emphasizes the need to improve early detection.
With this challnge in mind we will devise nanochemistry methods for hybrid nanocrystal cluster structures, where coupled physical responses of plasmonic and superparamagnetic nature will enable novel contrast agents (CAs) for biomedical imaging.
The work is part of collaborative research that combines the know-how of three groups within FORTH, working in cross-disciplinary fields (materials science, bioengineering and tissue engineering), aiming to develop a fully characterized new multimodal nanoscale particle assembly that will serve as contrast agent. The research effort is organized to facilitate a resource-sharing culture to tackle open questions that will increase sensitivity and specificity in the early detection of atherosclerotic lesions by exploiting photoacoustic (PAI) and magnetic (MRI) resonance imaging techniques.
Principal Investigator
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To: 16/03/2022 14:00
The scattering and diffraction of waves through complex media is a paradigmatic phenomenon that has captured the attention of various communities of physics for quite some time now. Recently, there is a lot of interest in composite media that contain spatial distributions of gain and loss materials. Due to the plethora of novel applications, like ultrasensitive sensors and gyroscopes, topological insulator lasers, non-reciprocal ring cavities and single mode nanolasers, such ideas have led to the new area of non-Hermitian photonics.
The first part of the talk will be devoted to localization problems in non-Hermitian disordered media. A generalization of the concept of plane waves and a novel way of propagation that is possible only in non-Hermitian systems will be presented. In the second part of the talk, we will examine the interplay between topological protection and non-Hermiticity around higher order exceptional points and their relation to the underlying theory of pseudospectra. Connection of the above topics to recent experiments will also be examined.
