CREDIT: Aya Eid, Northwestern University

This video presents a simulation of the electric field as a plane wave propagates through a human cheek cell mounted to a glass slide. It was conducted using the Finite Different Time Domain technique and an open source software called Angora. The 3D refractive indices of a whole cell were first determined using tomographic STEM. The goal of this simulation was to characterize the spectral response of healthy cells with respect to subdiffractional structural alterations associated with carcinogenesis. The simulation had 601 x 601 x 240 ~ 90 million grid points, and the video presented was recorded for a period of 5000 time steps. The video shows the |E| in decibels, which, towards the end, allows us to visualize the field reverberating in the cell after the initial excitement. We believe these weak signals may be responsible for intracellular scattering which modulate the statistical metrics that characterize the nanoscale architecture of the media.