Description: Semiconductor nanowire and polymer FET devices used as charge/potential transducers at the cell interface.
Micolich works on semiconductor nanowire and organic/polymer nanoelectronic devices, with two strands relevant here: the physics of low-dimensional transport and noise in nanowire transistors, and the use of those devices as transducers at the interface with biological systems, where a nanowire field-effect transistor acts as an extremely local potentiometer sensitive to charge and potential changes at the cell membrane. The group has a strong record in noise spectroscopy — using 1/f and random telegraph noise as a diagnostic rather than a nuisance. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — nanowire FET bioelectronic sensing is the principal electrical competitor to NV-based bio-magnetometry: both aim to read out cellular electrophysiology without patch-clamping, one via magnetic fields at pT/sqrt(Hz), the other via local potential. Borderline inclusion, kept because the bio-interface sensing thread is genuine.