  Since the discovery of graphene, its excellent physical properties has
greatly improved the performance of many optoelectronic devices and brought
important technological revolution to optical research and application. Here,
we introduce graphene into the field of optical tweezers technology and
demonstrate a new thermoelectric optical tweezers technology based on graphene.
This technology can not only reduce the incident light energy by 2 orders of
magnitude (compared with traditional optical tweezers), but also bring new
advantages such as much broader working bandwidth and larger working area than
the thermoelectric optical tweezers based on gold film widely studied before.
Compared with gold film, graphene has more novel characteristics like high
thermal conductivity, high uniformity and easy process. Thus, we found even
monolayer graphene can achieve stable trapping for particles in a broad band,
and the performance is enhanced with more graphene layers. Furthermore,
structured graphene patterns can be easily generated to holographically trap
multiple particles as desired shapes. This work verifies the great application
potential of two-dimensional materials in op-tical tweezers technology, and it
will promote more promising applications in cell trapping, tapping or
concentration of biomolecules, microfluidics and biosensors.
