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Fiber-based optical trapping and manipulation

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Abstract

An optical fiber serves as a versatile tool for optical trapping and manipulation owing to its many advantages over conventional optical tweezers, including ease of fabrication, compact configurations, flexible manipulation capabilities, ease of integration, and wide applicability. Here, we review recent progress in fiber-based optical trapping and manipulation, which includes mainly photothermal-based and optical-force-based trapping and manipulation. We focus on five topics in our review of progress in this area: massive photothermal trapping and manipulation, evanescent-field-based trapping and manipulation, dual-fiber tweezers for single-nanoparticle trapping and manipulation, single-fiber tweezers for single-particle trapping and manipulation, and single-fiber tweezers for multiple-particle/cell trapping and assembly.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11774135).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Nanophotonics, Jinan University, Guangzhou, 511443, China

    Hongbao Xin & Baojun Li

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  1. Hongbao Xin
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  2. Baojun Li
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Correspondence to Baojun Li.

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Hongbao Xin received his Ph.D. degree in Optical Engineering from Sun Yat-Sen University, China, in 2016. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Biomedical Institute for Global Health Research and Technology (BIGHEART) of the National University of Singapore, and also works as a Visiting Scientist at the BioPOETS Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, USA. His research focuses on optical trapping and manipulation, bionanophotonics and nanoplasmonics.

Baojun Li received his Ph.D. degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University in China in 1998. He worked at the Fudan University in Shanghai, China as a Postdoctoral Fellow from 1998 to 2000. After that, he worked at the Singapore- MIT Alliance and National University of Singapore from 2000 to 2002, first at a Postdoctoral Fellow and then as a Research Fellow. From April to October 2002, he worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering in Singapore. He joined the Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China as a full Professor in 2002, and served as the Director of the Research Laboratory for Optoelectronic Integration and Lasers in the State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies. From May to November 2009, he worked at the University of Oxford as a Senior Visiting Scholar. After that, he came back to the Sun Yat-Sen University as a Chang Jiang Scholar Professor and served as the Dean of the School of Physics and Engineering. In July 2016, he moved to Jinan University, Guangzhou, China, where he currently serves as the Director for the Institute of Nanophotonics.

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Xin, H., Li, B. Fiber-based optical trapping and manipulation. Front. Optoelectron. 12, 97–110 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12200-017-0755-z

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