Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 22, 2026
Utilization of Plasmonic and Photonic Crystal Nanostructures for Enhanced Micro- and Nanoparticle Manipulation
Published on: September 27, 2011
Optical trapping and manipulation of metallic micro/nanoparticles via photorefractive crystals
Xinzheng Zhang1, Junqiao Wang, Baiquan Tang
1MOE Key Laboratory of Weak-Light Nonlinear Photonics, TEDA Applied Physics School and Institute of Physics, Nankai University, Tianjin, China.
Abstract:
A simple method to trap and manipulate metallic micro/nano-particles on the surface of photorefractive crystals is proposed. After inducing inhomogeneous charge density and space-charge fields in photorefractive crystals by non-uniform illumination, both uncharged and charged metallic particles can be trapped on the illuminated surface due to dielectrophoretic force and electrophoretic force, respectively. A transition from dielectrophoresis to electrophoresis is observed when manipulating nano-silver particles with high surface space-charge field. Our results show that this method is simple and effective to form surface microstructures of metallic particles.
