Since the pioneering work of Ashkin and coworkers, back in 1970, optical manipulation gained an increasing interest among the scientific community. Indeed, the advantages and the possibilities of this technique are unsubtle, allowing for the manipulation of small particles with a broad spectrum of dimensions (nanometers to micrometers size), with no physical contact and without affecting the sample viability. Thus, optical manipulation rapidly found a large set of applications in different fields, such as cell biology, biophysics, and genetics. Moreover, large benefits followed the combination of optical manipulation and microfluidic channels, adding to optical manipulation the advantages of microfluidics, such as a continuous sample replacement and therefore high throughput and automatic sample processing. In this work, we will discuss the state of the art of these optofluidic devices, where optical manipulation is used in combination with microfluidic devices. We will distinguish on the optical method implemented and three main categories will be presented and explored: (i) a single highly focused beam used to manipulate the sample, (ii) one or more diverging beams imping on the sample, or (iii) evanescent wave based manipulation.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi9050200 | DOI Listing |
Nanophotonics
January 2025
Departments of Optics and General Physics, Francisk Skorina Gomel State University, Sovetskaya Str. 104, Gomel 246019, Belarus.
Optical vortex beams carrying orbit angular momentum have attracted significant attention recently. Perfect vortex beams, characterized by their topological charge-independent intensity profile, have important applications in enhancing communication capacity and optimizing particle manipulation. In this paper, metal-insulator-metal copper-coin type reflective metasurfaces are proposed to generate perfect composite vortex beams in X-band.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNanophotonics
January 2025
Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong.
Topological insulators and bound states in the continuum represent two fascinating topics in the optical and photonic domain. The exploration of their interconnection and potential applications has emerged as a current research focus. Here, we investigated non-Hermitian photonics based on a parallel cascaded-resonator system, where both direct and indirect coupling between adjacent resonators can be independently manipulated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnal Chem
January 2025
State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics and Department of Physics, Academy for Engineering and Technology, Key Laboratory of Micro and Nano Photonic Structures (Ministry of Education), Shanghai Key Laboratory of Metasurfaces for Light Manipulation, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
Numerous chemical reactions and most life processes occur in aqueous solutions, where the physical diffusion of small molecules plays a vital role, including solvent water molecules, solute biomolecules, and ions. Conventional methods of measuring diffusion coefficients are often limited by technical complexity, large sample consumption, or significant time cost. Here, we present an optical imaging method to study molecular diffusion by combining stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy with microfluidics: a "Y"-shaped microfluidic channel forming two laminar flows with a stable concentration gradient across the interface.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
January 2025
Dipartimento di Fisica, Sapienza Università di Roma, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185, Roma, Italy.
The implementation of large-scale universal quantum computation represents a challenging and ambitious task on the road to quantum processing of information. In recent years, an intermediate approach has been pursued to demonstrate quantum computational advantage via non-universal computational models. A relevant example for photonic platforms has been provided by the Boson Sampling paradigm and its variants, which are known to be computationally hard while requiring at the same time only the manipulation of the generated photonic resources via linear optics and detection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdv Sci (Weinh)
January 2025
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA.
The optical modulation of ferroelectric polarization constitutes a transformative, non-contact strategy for the precise manipulation of ferroelectric properties, heralding advancements in optically stimulated ferroelectric devices. Despite its potential, progress in this domain is constrained by material limitations and the intricate nature of the underlying mechanisms. Recent studies have achieved efficient regulation of ferroelectric polarization and thermal conductivity in chiral ferroelectric thin films through the application of left- and right-handed circularly polarized light (LCP and RCP).
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