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Updated: Aug 2, 2025
High-Speed Magnetic Tweezers for Nanomechanical Measurements on Force-Sensitive Elements
Published on: May 12, 2023
Electric Tweezers
D L Fan1, F Q Zhu2, R C Cammarata3
1Materials Science and Engineering Program, Texas Materials Institute, Center of Nano and Molecular Science and Technology, and Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78759.
Abstract:
Electric tweezers utilize DC and AC electric fields through voltages applied on patterned electrodes to manipulate nanoentities suspended in a liquid. Nanowires with a large aspect ratio are particularly suitable for use in electric tweezers for patterning, assembling, and manipulation. Despite operating in the regime of extremely small particle Reynolds number (of order 10-5), electric tweezers can manipulate nanowires with high precision to follow any prescribed trajectory, to rotate nanowires with controlled chirality, angular velocity and rotation angle, and to assemble nanowires to fabricate nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) devices such as nanomotors and nano-oscillators. Electric tweezers have also been used to transport in a highly controlled manner drug-carrying functionalized nanowires for cell-specific drug delivery.
