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Plasmonics

Finer optical tweezers

Nature Photonics volume 2, pages 333–334 (2008)Cite this article

The use of nanostructured gold substrates is now allowing optical tweezers to exploit plasmonics and confine nanoparticles to ever smaller dimensions.

The development of optical trapping techniques to control objects at the nanoscale is an important and challenging endeavour. Optical tweezers with nanometre precision offer a means to study the dynamics of single macromolecules1, probe subcellular compartments of living cells2 and construct structures from nanoscale objects3. On page 365 of this issue, Alexander Grigorenko and co-workers4 demonstrate a new implementation of nanoscale optical tweezers that exploits a nanopatterned plasmonic substrate. Their approach shows much promise for creating large-scale arrays of highly precise optical traps for nanoscale objects, with potential applications in areas such as surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS).

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Figure 1: Plasmonic nanotweezers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Peter J. Reece is in the School of Physics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia. p.reece@unsw.edu.au,

    Peter J. Reece

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  1. Peter J. Reece
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Reece, P. Finer optical tweezers. Nature Photon 2, 333–334 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2008.88

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2008.88

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