The US Air Force has awarded RHK Technology, Inc. Phase II STTR funding to develop ground-breaking Nano-analytical instruments crucial for National Security and American research and industrial competitiveness.

RHK is collaborating with Dr. Lukas Novotny and the University of Rochester Nano-Optics group. They are combining their expertise to develop and commercialize a Nano-Spectroscopy platform to perform chemically-specific imaging with high spatial resolution at a level far surpassing the best products found in the market today. The RHK-Novotny team successfully demonstrated their novel techniques in Phase 1 and is now the only group awarded Phase II funding.

Adam Kollin, RHK President, said, “Identifying both the ‘where’ and the ‘what’ of unknown compounds – and doing so non-destructively – delivers huge advantages in materials science, nanotech, and catalysis. We call it Hyperspectral Imaging, or chemical fingerprinting at the nano-scale.” For Military and Security applications, such an instrument could screen for and reverse engineer high energy density materials, radar absorbing materials, biologically active nano-systems, and nuclear nanomaterials.

The Nano-Spectroscopy Platform is the first to enable a non-specialist or specialist to produce and analyze high quality spectroscopic data correlated with nanometer scale topographic images in real time. It is also the first to enable simultaneous use of all contact and non-contact AFM and STM imaging modes with spectroscopic tasks such as confocal and tip-enhanced fluorescence, extinction, Raman scattering and other nonlinear scattering.

The market demand and commercial potential for this capability are broad, multi-faceted, and growing rapidly. In Phase II, instrument capabilities will be further advanced and packaged as a Platform at an initial stage of commercial productization. Full standardization for manufacturing and formal release will commence in Phase III.