Numerical Investigation of Tunable Plasmonic Tweezers based on Graphene Stripes

Abstract

We are proposing tunable plasmonic tweezers, consisting two parallel graphene stripes, which can be utilized to effectively trap and sort nanoparticles. We show that by electrostatically tuning the chemical potential of a graphene stripe by about 100 meV (equivalent to ΔVG ≈ 4.4 V), the plasmonic force can be switched efficiently, without a need to switch the laser intensity. This enables high speed and low power switching with a large number of switching cycles. By applying two independent and appropriate gate bias voltages to the stripes, the direction of the plasmonic force can be reversed, which leads to separation of nanoparticles that satisfy the trapping conditions. Numerical simulations show that the potential depths obtained for polystyrene nanoparticles of refractive index n = 1.5717 and radii r ≥ 50 nm is deeper than −10 kBT , confirming the ability of the proposed system to effectively separate such nanoparticles. This capability holds for smaller nanoparticles with larger refractive indices. Finally, performing thermal simulations, we have demonstrated that the heat induced by the illumination increases the fluid temperature by at most 9 °C, having negligible effect on the trapping mechanism. The proposed system opens up new possibilities in developing tunable on-chip manipulation devices, suitable for biological applications.