Topic: Pumping condensed matter in resonators: from physics to biomolecular recognition with viral lasers
Abstract: Driven by the availability of short pulse lasers producing photons at essentially arbitrary wavelengths, there is large interest in the non-equilibrium dynamics of optically driven condensed matter. It is only natural to extend such studies to the strong coupling regime by employing resonators, for which the most dramatic consequence is the lasing transition. We report here on this transition where the condensed matter system used is delivered by synthetic biology, in the form of the M13 (phage) virus. Apart from revealing new interaction effects which need to be inserted into the underlying rate equations, our research provides ideas for novel biomedical assays, which take advantage of optical rather chemical amplification as in PCR. We describe two proof-of-concept experiments, the first demonstrating a viral load measurement and the second an immunoassay.