Abstract
Recent advances in opto-thermophoretic tweezers open new avenues for low-power trapping and manipulation of nanoparticles with potential applications in colloidal assembly, nanomanufacturing, life sciences, and nanomedicine. However, to fully exploit the opto-thermophoretic tweezers for widespread applications, the enhancement of their versatility in nanoparticle manipulations is pivotal. For this purpose, we translate our newly developed opto-thermophoretic tweezers onto an optical fiber platform known as opto-thermophoretic fiber tweezers (OTFT). We have demonstrated the applications of OTFT as a nanoparticle concentrator, as a nanopipette for single particle delivery, and as a nanoprobe. The simple setup and functional versatility of OTFT would encourage its use in various fields such as additive manufacturing, single nanoparticle-cell interactions, and biosensing.
Highlights
Opto-thermophoretic tweezers have emerged as a new class of tweezers for trapping and manipulation of particles [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
It consists of a single mode fiber (SMF) with a thermoplasmonic tip, which is a porous Au film (AuNIs) fabricated by depositing a thin layer of gold on the fiber tip, Figure 1: opto-thermophoretic fiber tweezers (OTFT) design, working principle and experimental set-up. (A) Schematic of the OTFT immersed in the trapping solution consisting of micellar ions, counterions, and the nanoparticles to be trapped
When light is launched from the fiber, the temperature gradient field generated at the tip of the fiber results in the thermophoresis of the micellar ions and Cl− ions
Summary
Opto-thermophoretic tweezers have emerged as a new class of tweezers for trapping and manipulation of particles [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The use of thermal gradient-induced forces by opto-thermophoretic tweezers offers some unique advantages as compared to the optical gradient forces used in conventional optical tweezers, both near-field [11,12,13] and far-field [14, 15]. Metallic nanoparticles as small as 20 nm could be trapped and manipulated [9], which are otherwise difficult to trap using traditional optical tweezers Another advantage is their simple design and fabrication. Opto-thermophoretic tweezers unique features such as simple design, lower-power operation, and the ability to trap and manipulate particles over a wide range of sizes, shapes, and materials make them an attractive alternative to the conventional optical tweezers and provide great potential for applications in material science, biology, nanomanufacturing, colloidal science, etc. To further develop opto-thermophoretic tweezers into a universal tool and unlock its potential for use by researchers working in diverse fields, the tweezers need
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