Thinh Bui with the Thermal MagIC system. The nanoparticle thermometers are suspended in liquid that’s been piped into tiny wells drilled into a quartz glass cube about the size of a paperweight. This cube sits in the middle of a coil (gold-colored, center). You can see the cube reflected in the mirror above the coil. The tiny wells in this cube form the letters “T” and “M,” which stand for “Thermal MagIC.” Additional coils (blue) surround the cube, providing changing electromagnetic fields that allow the researchers to scan the 3D image point by point. Finally, the nanoparticles are exposed to different temperatures by liquid cooling via the tubing visible beneath the coils.
Credit: Jennifer Lauren Lee/NIST
Thermometers can do a lot of things: measure the temperature at the center of your perfectly braised chicken or tell you whether to keep your child home from school due to illness. But because of their size, traditional thermometers’ uses are still limited.
“How do you non-invasively measure a temperature inside a living system such as a human?” said NIST’s Thinh Bui. “Or in other environments that may be hard to access – say, the temperature inside a Kevlar vest as a bullet penetrates it. How do you have access to that? You can't stick a traditional thermometer in there.”
If researchers had a thermometry system that could measure tiny changes in temperature, with high spatial resolution, inside objects opaque to light, that could potentially revolutionize the fields of medicine and manufacturing.
To address these needs, NIST researchers are working on an ambitious project called Thermal Magnetic Imaging and Control, or “Thermal MagIC
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