Synergy between pyroelectric and photovoltaic effects for optoelectronic nanoparticle manipulation

The combined action of the pyroelectric (PY) and photovoltaic (PV) effects, exhibited by z-cut LiNbO₃:Fe substrates, has been investigated for particle trapping and patterning applications. The novel hybrid procedure provides new possibilities and versatility to optoelectronic manipulation on LiNbO₃ substrates. It has allowed obtaining periodic and arbitrary 2D patterns whose particle density distribution is correlated with the light intensity profile but can be tuned through ΔT according to the relative strength of the PV and PY effects. A relevant result is that the PY and PV contributions compete for a ΔT range of 1-20 °C, very accessible for experiments. Moreover, the synergy of the PY and PV has provided two additional remarkable applications: i) A method to measure the PV field, key magnitude for photovoltaic optoelectronic tweezers. Using this method, the minimum field needed to obtain a particle pattern has been determined, resulting relatively high, E~60 kV/cm, and so, requiring highly doped crystals when only using the PV effect. ii) An strategy combining the PY and PV to get particle patterning in samples inactive for PV trapping when the PV field value is under that threshold.