Dr. André C. Arsenault never meant to co-found a nanotech company. With a bachelor’s degree in biological chemistry and a PhD in polymer and materials chemistry, he had always planned to enter the academic world and become a professor.
But Arsenault was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and took his nano-science expertise into the industrial world. Now, he’s the Chief Technology Officer at Opalux Inc., a company spun off of U of T’s department of chemistry.
During a workshop at the Undergraduate Nanotechnology Conference on Saturday, Arsenault presented an overview of Opalux’s core technologies. The company uses photonic crystals, a technology based on the idea that colour consists of a combination of order and disorder. For example, a gemstone like an opal has colour not because of a dye or pigment, but because of a structure of transparent spheres and the medium the spheres are in. The combination of spheres and medium creates different colours when light is diffracted through the material.
“Our goal is commercializing some of the technology that’s come out of the chemistry department based on photonic crystals,” said Arsenault. His company’s products manipulate these photonic crystals so that they can coat flat surfaces or create films of the material.
Arsenault’s synthetic photonic crystals consist of 74 per cent spheres and 26 per cent free space which can be filled with nearly any material to change the diffraction properties and, therefore, the crystal’s colour. This technology can be used as a sensor with a colour readout to detect various substances, such as glucose in patients with diabetes. Detection of the molecule results in an immediate change in colour and could render complicated detection machines obsolete.
Another one of Opalux’s innovations is Elastink, elastic photonic crystals with rubber filling material used to capture a fingerprint in colour. Unlike its black-and-white counterpart, a fingerprint obtained through Elastink provides more detailed data about the quality of the skin and essentially provides a “biometric signature.” This technology can offer higher security against counterfeiters in everything from ID and credit cards to merchandise.
One of the works-in-progress at Arsenault’s company is photonic ink, or P-Ink. The technology consists of a photonic crystal gel that can be patterned into a pixel field of ink dots. Unlike backlit LCD screens, photonic crystals reflect light hitting their surface, making it possible to read photonic crystal displays even in full sunlight.
“[P-Ink] is not an ink. Part of it can be printed but it’s not an ink per se,” explained Arsenault. “We initially chose [“P-Ink”] to contrast E Ink, which comes from a company spun out of MIT a while back.”
While the technology of E Ink can display two colour values (i.e. black or white), P-Ink can display any colour value in the visible spectrum, an innovation that may revolutionize the electronic paper industry. However, Opalux Inc. faces major challenges in the production of the film on a large-scale.
“We presented this technology to various people and they just saw the technology potential,” said Arsenault. “Just to see these materials actually make it into a product is hugely validating for the work.”
