Maryana Escalante

Contributions during the Master:

Maury P, Escalante M, Reinhoudt DN and Juriaan Huskens.
Directed assembly of nanoparticles onto polymer-imprinted or chemically patterned templates fabricated by nanoimprint lithography 
ADVANCED MATERIALS 17 (22): 2718+ NOV 18 2005

Offerhaus HL, van den Bergen B, Escalante M, Segerink FB, Korterik JP, van Hulst NF
Creating focused plasmons by noncollinear phasematching on functional gratings 
NANO LETTERS 5 (11): 2144-2148 NOV 2005

Current project summary:

Different approaches for patterning biomolecules.

Specific target: Light harvesting antenna complexes

Long before we began to think about the design and construction of synthetic efficient photonic structures, nature has already evolved several examples that use nano-scale architectures to produce striking optical effects.^, For example, in photosynthesis the harvesting of solar energy and its subsequent conversion into stable products depends of an interconnected macromolecular network of membrane associated chlorophyll-protein complexes. Although much has been speculated before about the native organization of this network, it was only recently that this network was revealed by the use of atomic force microscopy (AFM). ^,

In the last decade, mayor efforts have been concentrated in the design and synthesis of supramolecular structures with precise properties such as dimensions and chemical composition because of it potential to be integrated in hybrid systems for molecular base electronics and photonics.

As a first step to understand the properties of bio-inspired assemblies onto chemically functionalized surfaces which eventually can lead to the fabrication of molecular photonic wires of unprecedented efficiency; we make use of a combination of top-down and bottom up approaches to direct the assembly of light harvesting antenna complexes LH1 and LH2 onto chemically modified glass substrates.