Resonant Dipolar Coupling of Microwaves with Confined Acoustic Vibrations in a Rod-shaped Virus

In this letter, we treat a rod-shaped virus as a free homogenous nanorod and identify its confined acoustic vibration modes that can cause strong resonant microwave absorption through electric dipolar excitation with a core-shell charge distribution. They are found to be the n = 4N-2 modes of the longitudinal modes of the nanorods, where N is an integer starting from 1 and n is the mode order quantum number. This study was confirmed by measuring the microwave absorption spectra of white spot syndrome virus (WSSV), which is a rod-shaped virus. This is also the first study to identify the “dipolar-like” mode in a rod-shaped nano-object. Our study is not only an important step to achieve rapid and sensitive detection of rod-shaped viruses based on their microwave spectroscopic features and a non-contact method to measure the Young’s modulus of rod-shaped viruses, but also is critical to formulate an efficient epidemic prevention strategy to deactivate viruses with the structure-resonant microwaves.