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Updated: May 27, 2026

Trapping of Micro Particles in Nanoplasmonic Optical Lattice
Published on: September 5, 2017
Ice particles trapped by temperature gradients at mbar pressure
Thorben Kelling1, Gerhard Wurm, Christoph Dürmann
1Fakultät für Physik, Universität Diusburg-Essen, Lotharstrasse 1, 47057 Duisburg, Germany. thorben.kelling@uni-due.de
Abstract:
In laboratory experiments we observe that ice particles (≤100 μm) entrained in a low pressure atmosphere (~1 mbar) get trapped by temperature gradients between three reservoirs at different temperature. Confining elements are a peltier element at 250 K (bottom), a liquid nitrogen reservoir at 77 K (top), and the surrounding vacuum chamber at 293 K. Particle levitation and trapping is modeled by an interplay of thermophoresis, photophoresis, and gravity. A number of ice particles are trapped simultaneously in close spatial distance to each other at least up to minutes and are accessible for further experiments.
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