All-optical manipulation of photonic membranes

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the all-optical manipulation of polymeric membranes in microfluidic environments, showing significant stability improvements over dielectric particles, which could enhance bio-photonic applications involving micrometric objects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for manipulating polymeric membranes optically with enhanced stability, suitable for bio-photonic and single-molecule studies.

Findings

8-fold increase in mechanical stability compared to dielectric particles

Membranes decorated with handles for holographic optical tweezers

Potential to improve bio-photonic applications

Abstract

Here we demonstrate the all-optical manipulation of polymeric membranes in microfluidic environments. The membranes are decorated with handles for their use in holographic optical tweezers setups. Our results show that due to their form factor the membranes present an 8-fold increase in their mechanical stability, respect to micrometric dielectric particles. This intrinsic superior stability is expected to improve profoundly a wide range of bio-photonic applications that rely on the optical manipulation of micrometric objects while studying single-molecule mechanics and sub-cellular scale transport processes.