I thought this was interesting, partly because I work for a company that is doing research for the US Department of Defense for the same sort of application. Of course we are designing the integrated device, not the diode. I was reading some of our old publications - probably more having to do with medical applications like cytometry (cell counting) than defense, and apparently we were able to get reasonably detectable fluorescence of dyed microparticles (which presumably simulate cells) with ordinary laser pointers!
I have not yet been involved in any of this yet, so I am speaking from a point of absolutely no expertise (and once I have expertise, I still can't say anything
). But since we can do fluorescence based analysis on biological materials with non-exotic wavelengths, why does this paper claim that biological threats "require" UV to detect?
They made it sound like maybe it is a matter of image processing (which would obviously be difficult if you laser light blocking out your picture), but with Lab-on-a-chip devices you don't process images, you just detect the fluorescence signals magically and record the number of evil particles
.
Well, this is my first post, so it doesn't have to make sense!
(come to think of it, even though microfluidic analysis can be done in the visible range, I can see why it may be improved in the UV.)