Detection of Living Cervical Cancer Cells by Transient Terahertz Spectroscopy.

The photonic energy of terahertz wave is in the same order of magnitude as the rotational and vibrational energy levels of organic and biological macro-molecules, so it has unique advantages in detecting cells and biological macro-molecules. However, in the life environment, the dynamic time scale of cell-environment interaction and structural conformation change of biological macro-molecules are within picosecond to millisecond, and water has strong absorption to terahertz wave, which has become the bottleneck problem for the detection of cells and biological macro-molecules by terahertz technology. In this paper, we developed a set of terahertz single measurement system based on the tilt wave front of grating pulse technique. The system was employed for the terahertz detection of trace living cervical cancer cells. We achieved transient detection of the terahertz pulse time domain waveform of the living HeLa cells. The characteristic absorption peaks were identified by Lambert-Beer law, respectively at 0.49 THz, 0.71 THz, 1.04 THz, 1.07 THz, 1.26 THz and1.37 THz. The absorbance is proportional to the cell concentration. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.