Contactless optical trapping and manipulation of nanoparticles utilizing SIBA mechanism and EDL force

On-chip optical tweezers based on evanescent fields overcome the diffraction limit of the free-space optical tweezers and can be a promising technique for developing lab-on-a-chip devices. While such trapping allows for low-cost and precise manipulation, it suffers from unavoidable contact with the device surface, which eliminates one of the major advantages of the optical trapping. Here, we use a 1D photonic crystal cavity to trap nanoparticles and propose a novel method to control and manipulate the particle distance from the cavity utilizing a self-induced back-action (SIBA) mechanism and electrical-double-layer (EDL) force. It is numerically shown that a 200 nm radius silica particle can be trapped near the cavity with a potential well deeper than 178k(B)T by 1 mW of input power without any contact with the surface and easily moved vertically with nanometer precision by wavelength detuning. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement