Researcher Matjaž Humar from Slovenia's Jožef Stefan Institute (IJS) has won a €150,000 Proof of Concept Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for a project aiming to produce lasers from edible materials so they could be used as sensors in food, medicines and other products.

Humar from the Laboratory for Biological and Soft Photonics of the IJS Department of Solid-State Physics already won a €1.5 million starting grant from the ERC in 2019 for his five-year Cell-Lasers research project, now following up successfully with the EdibleLasers project.

The field of edible laser research is almost non-existent and therefore offers huge potential, the IJS said in announcing the grant. In his winning project Humar will try to make lasers out of edible materials and test their performance in food.

Such lasers will allow very precise measurements of food properties, thus contributing to food quality and safety. "Their small size means they will not change the properties of the food, but being made from the food itself, they will be able to detect changes in freshness more quickly," the IJS said.

Edible lasers also open up the possibility of wider applications: they could be used as sensors for medical purposes, in substances and products for agriculture, industry and sustainable monitoring of the environment and drinking water. In this way, lasers will have a significant impact on the quality of our lives, the IJS added.

Humar and his team will complete the ERC Cell-Lasers research project, which develops biological lasers to study processes inside cells and biological organisms, next year. He is now the seventh Slovenian researcher to have won additional ERC support to develop the innovative potential of his research, and the third at the IJS.

Humar is the first person to have successfully embed a laser in a living cell and showed that fat cells present in human body already contain lasers. Earlier this year, together with Zala Korenjak, he created a laser using a soap bubble, and more recently, with colleagues at the IJS and researchers at the Max Planck Institute, he successfully designed the first entangled photons, or quantum light, in liquid crystals, such as those found in TV screens. In 2022, he was awarded the Blinc Prize for early career physicists.