Guest Seminar - The optics of life - from biogenic structural colors to biomimetics - Prof. Dan Oron

Abstract

Light is the source of life on Earth, and is used in numerous ways in the plant and animal kingdoms for a variety of applications, including photosynthesis, vision, camouflage, communication, thermal management and more. As such, evolution has led to the creation of intricate optical systems with highly controlled and regulated properties. The talk will present an overview of some of these unique optical systems, focusing on the ubiquitous guanine-based optical reflectors and on more recently discovered 3D structural color systems. In particular, correlated optical and structural characterization will be shown to unearth new information about the function of some of the more poorly understood biological light manipulation systems and to reveal clues about their evolution. Finally, the potential for previously unexplored bioinspired optics based on these findings will be discussed.
 

Bio

Dan Oron is a professor at the department of Molecular Chemistry and Materials Science at the Weizmann institute, where he has held a PI position since 2007. His main research interests are at the interface between light and the nanoscale, studying both the interaction of light with nanostructured materials (mostly inorganic and hybrid semiconductor nanocrystals), optical superresolution methods based on measurements not associated with the intensity of scattered light, e.g. photon statistics or phase, and the optics of biological nanostructured materials and their biomimetic analogs. Among his main achievements are the development of quantum superresolution microscopy, the elucidation of the role of extreme birefringence in biological and biomimetic optical devices and the development of new methods for advanced spectroscopy of multiply excited states in individual quantum dots.