Integrated optofluidics: Optical control of particles and droplets in fluidic environments

Being a key enabling technology, optofluidics allows precise light-based manipulation of liquids and solid particles on micrometer scales in fluidic environments and covers high potential to fabricate efficient integrated lab-on-a-chip devices. In many of these devices, the ability to control and to manipulate particles by light is of utmost importance. This comprises an all-optical treatment of particles, viable cells, or droplets to be moved or trapped for analytical purposes. Such an all-optical control can be realized either by direct exposure in optical tweezers or indirectly by activating electric, thermal or mechanical properties by nonlinear light-matter interaction. Beneath particle manipulation, we demonstrate control of cells by holographic optical tweezers as well as droplet manipulation based on dielectrophoretic optical tweezers.Σ