“The piezoelectric effect has never been manipulated at this scale before, so the range of possible applications is very exciting,” explained Pooja Tyagi, a PhD researcher in Professor Patanjali Kambhampati’s laboratory. “For example, the vibrations of a material can be analyzed to calculate the pressure of the solvent they are in. With further development and research, maybe we could measure blood pressure non-invasively by injecting the dots, shining a laser on them, and analyzing their vibration to determine the pressure.”
(The title was the pun I forgot to use in my thesis defense talk, in describing our homemade diode laser systems)