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Evanescent field trapping and propulsion of Janus particles along optical nanofibers.

ABSTRACT: Small composite objects, known as Janus particles, drive sustained scientific interest primarily targeted at biomedical applications, where such objects act as micro- or nanoscale actuators, carriers, or imaging agents. A major practical challenge is to develop effective methods for the manipulation of Janus particles. The available long-range methods mostly rely on chemical reactions or thermal gradients, therefore having limited precision and strong dependency on the content and properties of the carrier fluid. To tackle these limitations, we propose the manipulation of Janus particles (here, silica microspheres half-coated with gold) by optical forces in the evanescent field of an optical nanofiber. We find that Janus particles exhibit strong transverse localization on the nanofiber and much faster propulsion compared to all-dielectric particles of the same size. These results establish the effectiveness of near-field geometries for optical manipulation of composite particles, where new waveguide-based or plasmonic solutions could be envisaged.

SUBMITTER: Tkachenko G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10043011 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Evanescent field trapping and propulsion of Janus particles along optical nanofibers.

Tkachenko Georgiy G Truong Viet Giang VG Esporlas Cindy Liza CL Sanskriti Isha I Nic Chormaic Síle S

Nature communications 20230327 1

Small composite objects, known as Janus particles, drive sustained scientific interest primarily targeted at biomedical applications, where such objects act as micro- or nanoscale actuators, carriers, or imaging agents. A major practical challenge is to develop effective methods for the manipulation of Janus particles. The available long-range methods mostly rely on chemical reactions or thermal gradients, therefore having limited precision and strong dependency on the content and properties of ...[more]

PMID: 36973283

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Project description:Force spectroscopy based on magnetic tweezers is a powerful technique for manipulating single biomolecules and studying their interactions. The resolution in magnetic probe displacement, however, needs to be commensurate with molecular sizes. To achieve the desirable sensitivity in tracking displacements of the magnetic probe, some recent approaches have combined magnetic tweezers with total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy. In this situation, a typical force probe is a polymer microsphere containing two types of optically active components: a pure absorber (magnetic nanoparticles for providing the pulling force) and a luminophore (semiconducting nanoparticles or organic dyes for fluorescent imaging). To assess the system's capability fully with regard to tracking the position of the force probe with subnanometer accuracy, we developed a body-of-revolution formulation of the method of auxiliary sources (BOR-MAS) to simulate the absorption, scattering, and fluorescence of microscopic spheres in an evanescent electromagnetic field. The theoretical formulation uses the axial symmetry of the system to reduce the dimensionality of the modeling problem and produces excellent agreement with the reported experimental data on forward scattering intensity. Using the BOR-MAS numerical model, we investigated the probe detection sensitivity for a high numerical aperture objective. The analysis of both backscattering and fluorescence observation modes shows that the total intensity of the bead image decays exponentially with the distance from the surface (or the length of a biomolecule). Our investigations demonstrate that the decay lengths of observable optical power are smaller than the penetration depth of the unperturbed excitation evanescent wave. In addition, our numerical modeling results illustrate that the expected sensitivity for the decay length changes with the angle of incidence, tracking the theoretical penetration depth for a two-media model, and is sensitive to the bead size. The BOR-MAS methodology developed in this work for near-field modeling of bead-tracking experiments fully describes the fundamental photonic response of microscopic BOR probes at the subwavelength level and can be used for future improvements in the design of these probes or in the setup of bead-tracking experiments.

Dataset Information

Evanescent field trapping and propulsion of Janus particles along optical nanofibers.

Publications

Evanescent field trapping and propulsion of Janus particles along optical nanofibers.

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