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Micromanipulation

Optoelectronic tweezers

Nature Materials volume 4, pages 579–580 (2005)Cite this article

A low-power light image projected on a photoconductive layer can initiate non-uniform electric fields over a large area, and allow the manipulation and sorting of particles without wires and electrodes and in the absence of flow.

Light and oscillating electric fields can grab and move objects at the microscale in a non-contact manner: this has allowed immense strides in molecular and cell biology and new fundamental physical insights. The latest advance reported in Nature1 shows how reconfigurable light patterns made with an incoherent and not very powerful light source (even a light bulb will do!) projected onto a specialized surface may induce controlled motion of objects. This opens up exciting new prospects for high-throughput biological cell analysis and studies of particle dynamics at the thermodynamic limit, thanks to extended, optically defined potential-energy landscapes.

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Figure 1: A potential-energy landscape created by light.

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  1. SUPA, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews, North Haugh, Fife, KY16 9SS, Scotland, UK

    Kishan Dholakia

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  1. Kishan Dholakia
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Dholakia, K. Optoelectronic tweezers. Nature Mater 4, 579–580 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1436

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1436

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