Biophotonics at ESPCI: from nano scale to macro scale.
Research activities take place at the interface of many fields and are characterized by a continuous balance between fundamental physics and applications.
We develop a number of optical methods for basic as well as applied physics. We will restrict here to the field of biophotonics:
-Near field imaging which breaks the classical resolution limit imposed by diffraction and follow fields distributions at a scale of a few nanometers in plasmonic structures. Plasmonics is also used to improve the biochips sensitivities.
-Optical imaging of biological tissues and cells to reveal optical contrast at various depth (despite of the strong level of scattering) and various resolutions (from mm to nm) breaking the diffraction limit in 3-D. OCT, Acousto-Optics and Photoacoustics are used for medical diagnostics.
-In parallel new optical probes are synthesized (quantum dots) with outstanding properties in term of quantum yield, stability, blinking and new paths to solubilize and to vectorize them specifically.
Albert Claude Boccara received his engineering degree from the Optical Institute and received his Ph.D. in solid state spectroscopy from ESCPI/University Pierre and Marie Curie. Professor Boccara is now Dean of research at ESPCI-Paris. He has been involved in light-condensed matter interactions for both basic and applied purposes and has developed several new instruments and instrumental methods. Spectroscopic polarisation based approaches for condensed materials have been developed, and the associated instrumentation (dichrometers and polarimeters) is still produced by industrial partners. In addition, both for spectroscopic application in "exotic" cases (strongly or very weekly absorbing samples) and local thermal characterisation of materials (down to the micron scale), he has developed a full range of photothermal approaches ("Mirage", Photothermal Microscope, Interferometers, IR Microscope…). This technique has been successfully applied to pollution monitoring as well as to ceramics characterisation. Among these methods, new kinds of microscopies have been recently been developed to increase depth and lateral resolution much below classical wavelength limits (picometers in depth and nanometers in lateral resolution), in keeping with his goal of understanding the physics of small objects. Recently, optical approaches to ultimate measurements have found new fields of application going from optical detection of gravitational waves (VIRGO project) to 3-D imaging though scattering media (such as biological tissues).
To read more about Dr. Boccara, please click here. | 
