Graphene Based Opt-Thermoelectric Tweezers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a graphene-based thermoelectric optical tweezer technology that significantly reduces energy use, broadens operational bandwidth, and enables complex particle trapping, demonstrating the potential of 2D materials in advanced optical manipulation.

Contribution

The work pioneers the integration of graphene into optical tweezers, achieving lower energy consumption and enhanced functionality compared to traditional gold-based systems.

Findings

Graphene reduces incident light energy by 100 times.

Stable particle trapping achieved with monolayer graphene.

Structured graphene patterns enable holographic multi-particle trapping.

Abstract

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.