Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) demonstrated a new type of optical tweezer with the potential to make biological and microfluidic force measurements in integrated systems such as microfluidic chips. The tweezer, consisting of a Fresnel Zone Plate microfabricated on a glass slide, has the ability to trap particles without the need for high performance objective lenses.
The device was designed, fabricated, and tested by postdoctoral fellow Ethan Schonbrun and undergraduate researcher Charles Rinzler under the direction of Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Ken Crozier (all are affiliated with SEAS). The team's results were published in the February 18th edition of Applied Physics Letters and the researchers have filed a U.S. provisional patent covering this new device.
"The microfabricated nature of the new optical tweezer offers an important advantage over conventional optical tweezers based on microscope objective lenses," says Crozier. "High performance objective lenses usually have very short working distances -- the trap is often ~200 mm or less from the front surface of the lens. This prevents their use in many microfluidic chips since these frequently have glass walls that are thicker than this."
The researchers note that the Fresnel Zone Plate optical tweezers could be fabricated on the inner walls of microfluidic channels or even inside cylindrical or spherical chambers and could perform calibrated force measurements in a footprint of only 100x100Î¼m.
Traditional tweezers, by contrast, would suffer from crippling aberrations in such locations. Moreover, in experimental trials, the optical tweezers exhibited trapping performance comparable to conventional optical tweezers when the diffraction efficiency was taken into account.
The researchers envision using their new tweezer inside microfluidic chips to carry out fluid velocity, refractive index, and local viscosity measurements. Additional applications include biological force measurements and sorting particles based on their size and refractive index. Particle-sorting chips based on large arrays of tweezers could be used to extract the components of interest of a biological sample in a high-throughput manner.
Michael Patrick Rutter | EurekAlert!
Physicists discover that lithium oxide on tokamak walls can improve plasma performance
22.05.2017 | DOE/Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Experts explain origins of topographic relief on Earth, Mars and Titan
22.05.2017 | City College of New York
Two-dimensional magnetic structures are regarded as a promising material for new types of data storage, since the magnetic properties of individual molecular building blocks can be investigated and modified. For the first time, researchers have now produced a wafer-thin ferrimagnet, in which molecules with different magnetic centers arrange themselves on a gold surface to form a checkerboard pattern. Scientists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel and the Paul Scherrer Institute published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
Ferrimagnets are composed of two centers which are magnetized at different strengths and point in opposing directions. Two-dimensional, quasi-flat ferrimagnets...
An Australian-Chinese research team has created the world's thinnest hologram, paving the way towards the integration of 3D holography into everyday...
In the race to produce a quantum computer, a number of projects are seeking a way to create quantum bits -- or qubits -- that are stable, meaning they are not much affected by changes in their environment. This normally needs highly nonlinear non-dissipative elements capable of functioning at very low temperatures.
In pursuit of this goal, researchers at EPFL's Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements LPQM (STI/SB), have investigated a nonlinear graphene-based...
Dental plaque and the viscous brown slime in drainpipes are two familiar examples of bacterial biofilms. Removing such bacterial depositions from surfaces is...
For the first time, scientists have succeeded in studying the strength of hydrogen bonds in a single molecule using an atomic force microscope. Researchers from the University of Basel’s Swiss Nanoscience Institute network have reported the results in the journal Science Advances.
Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and is an integral part of almost all organic compounds. Molecules and sections of macromolecules are...
22.05.2017 | Event News
17.05.2017 | Event News
16.05.2017 | Event News
22.05.2017 | Materials Sciences
22.05.2017 | Life Sciences
22.05.2017 | Physics and Astronomy