Drug detection device

Advanced sensors that can detect illegal drugs and chemical weapons in seconds are being developed by scientists at Queen’s University Belfast.

The devices will use special gel pads to swipe an individual or crime scene to gather a sample. The sample will then be analysed by a scanning instrument that can detect the presence of chemicals within seconds. The research team hopes this will allow better, faster decisions to be made in response to terrorist threats or suspected cases of drug consumption.

The scanning instrument will use Raman spectroscopy, which involves shining a laser beam onto the suspected sample and measuring the energy of light that scatters from it to determine what chemical compound is present. The Queen’s University team claims it is so sophisticated it can measure particles of a miniscule scale making detection faster and more accurate.

This type of spectroscopy is not normally sensitive enough to detect low concentrations of chemicals, so the researchers mixed the sample with nanoscale silver particles to amplify the signals of compounds and allow smaller traces to be detected.