Bringing Materials Science to Bear the Covid-19 Needs*

The COVID-19 pandemic has make clear the need of more fast and reliable methods for testing .The golden standard on testing is the rT-PCR method which uses expensive chemicals .Even though in the last year the speed in which test results are produced do not allow instant tracing of infected people .We have propose the use of Raman Spectroscopy to detect the virus .However the Raman signal is very weak and we need to use Surface enhanced Raman Spectroscopy .This implies the use of plasmonic nanoparticles which are tuned to the main absorption wavelengths of the virus .Raman is based on Physics and Materials Science methods and produces instant results .
In this work we will report the advances in our lab on developing SARS-CoVi-2 testing and will show that can become the golden standard for testing.