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.

Atherosclerotic plaque rupture or erosion and subsequent development of platelet-containing thrombus formation is the fundamental cause of cardiovascular disease, which is the most common cause of death and disability worldwide. Here we show the high sensitivity of 200–270 GHz T-ray to distinguish thrombus formation at its early stage from uncoagulated blood. A clinical observational study was conducted to longitudinally monitor the T-ray absorption constant of ex-vivo human blood during the thrombus formation from 29 subjects. Compared with the control group (28 subjects) with uncoagulated blood samples, our analysis indicates the high sensitivity of 200–270 GHz T-Ray to detect thrombus with a low p-value < 10−5. Further analysis supports the significant role of platelet-activated thrombotic cascade, which modified the solvation dynamics of blood and occurred during the early coagulation stage, on the measured T-Ray absorption change. The ability to sense the thrombus formation at its early stage would hold promise for timely identification of patients at risk of various atherothrombotic disorders and save billions of lives.