Near-field optical tweezers on a chip based on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform have drawn significant attention as prominent particle manipulation tools in chemistry, biology, and materials science. In this work, we demonstrate a lowloss tapered silicon waveguide with a high intensity gradient to trap microparticles. The high transmittance of this waveguide makes it easy to cascade many traps along the direction of light propagation. Optical forces in all three dimensions are analyzed using an in-house modeling toolkit. Experimentally, an integrated waveguide-based optical tweezer with a cascade of five trapping units is fabricated by electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching. Yeast cells are successfully trapped at different trapping units in the cascaded tapered waveguide using only around 20 mW of optical power at 1550-nm wavelength. We believe that the proposed scheme exhibits great potential for applications in biological analysis and optical detection.
Recently, near-field optical tweezers integrated on a chip based on silicon on insulator (SOI) have attracted more attention and are promising for biological and chemical analyses. Here we propose a low-loss tapered Si waveguide with a high intensity gradient in the electric field to trap microparticles whose diameters vary from 1 μm to 5 μm. The high transmittance allows for cascading the traps along the direction of light propagation. Optical forces in all three dimensions are analyzed around a high-stiffness potential well obtained.
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