A Quartz Sensor That Detects Single Particles
Chinese Academy of Sciences
A standard quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) has been turned into a much more sensitive mass sensor by using a normally avoided physical behavior: non-linear resonance. Instead of relying only on the small frequency shifts used in conventional sensing, the new method tracks an abrupt amplitude drop that appears when the device is driven into a non-linear regime. With this strategy, the system detected single micro/nanoparticles and protein binding events, reaching a detection limit of about 100