Skoltech Global

🌿💡 Nature spent millions of years perfecting optics, and Skoltech researchers just 3D-printed its work at 2,000 times the scale Terahertz imaging offers a safer alternative to X-rays for early skin cancer detection and industrial testing. But adoption has stalled because the necessary optical components are scarce and expensive. To solve this, researchers turned to diatom microalgae — organisms that naturally focus sunlight through microscopic, glass-like shells. The team captured the shell's geometry and enlarged it 2,000-fold via precision 3D printing to prove it could focus terahertz waves via the Talbot effect.

“Scaling up an object can simplify the experiment without sacrificing the quality of the resulting physical picture of the phenomenon,”

noted the study’s principal investigator, Professor Dmitry Gorin, head of the Biophotonics Laboratory at Skoltech Photonics. By shifting the scale, nature’s sunlight collector became a direct blueprint for next-generation medical imaging hardware.

“The reliance on a design optimized by nature will considerably simplify calculations compared with creating components from scratch, and 3D printing will make manufacture cheaper than would be possible with lithography,"

added study co-author and grant project lead Julijana Cvjetinovic, an Assistant Professor at Skoltech Photonics. The key to affordable medical scanners was floating in a microscopic shell all along. Published in Light: Advanced Manufacturing