Contactless optical trapping and manipulation of nanoparticles utilizing SIBA mechanism and EDL force.

Abstract

On-chip optical tweezers based on evanescent fields overcome the diffraction limit of the free-space optical tweezers and can be a promising technique for developing lab-on-a-chip devices. While such trapping allows for low-cost and precise manipulation, it suffers from unavoidable contact with the device surface, which eliminates one of the major advantages of the optical trapping. Here, we use a 1D photonic crystal cavity to trap nanoparticles and propose a novel method to control and manipulate the particle distance from the cavity utilizing a self-induced back-action (SIBA) mechanism and electrical-double-layer (EDL) force. It is numerically shown that a 200 nm radius silica particle can be trapped near the cavity with a potential well deeper than 178kBT by 1 mW of input power without any contact with the surface and easily moved vertically with nanometer precision by wavelength detuning.