Acoustic tweezers and motor for living cells

Abstract

Acoustic waves can act as tweezers to trap and rotate particles without contact, which have promising application in the manipulation of tissues and living cells. Here, we report a realization of acoustic tweezers and motor. The device is fabricated on a silicon chip scaled to manipulate living cells. The silicon chip transfers incident plane ultrasonic waves into a vortex beam, which traps particles in the center of the device and exerts torque on the particles simultaneously. As an illustration, we put living shrimp eggs inside the acoustic vortex and observe the acoustic driving rotation. The rotation frequency of the shrimp egg can be easily controlled, and its relationship between driving voltage and the egg size is established. We anticipate that the acoustic tweezers and motor can find widespread applications in cell manipulation, cell screening, and micro actuator in the future.

Contactless acoustic micro/nano manipulation: a paradigm for next generation applications in life sciences

“…SAW-I devices often require planar micromachined transducers synthesized using photolithography, and are aimed at tissue engineering and laboratory-on-a-chip applications [9]. The distribution of transducers varies from rectangular [25,31] to circular [40,42,50] morphology to trap particles at desired focal points like an optical lens. Owing to this functional similarity with optical tweezers, this class of manipulation devices are referred as acoustic tweezers [1,25,41].…”

“…On the other hand, the one-sided configuration typically consists of a planar, spherical or cylindrical arrangement of transducers [41] (figure 3 b ) and Bessel beam manipulators [40] with a focal point providing greater accessibility to the workspace. With the advent of rapid prototyping and fabrication techniques, the one-sided Bessel manipulators have matured into more intricately designed monolithic transducers that function as acoustic vortex traps [42] and holographic lenses [43].

Figure 3Different bulk acoustic manipulation methods: ( a ) two-sided configuration-based on planar arrangement of transducers (Adapted with permission from [31], © 2014 Ochiai et al Licensed under CC BY 4.0.).

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Underwater Acoustic Multiplexing Communication by Pentamode Metasurface

“…Due to the similarity between optics and acoustics, OAM in acoustics has been investigated extensively in recent decades. Many efforts on acoustic vortex wave have been reported, including OAM beam formed by active arrays [12] and metamaterials [13][14][15][16][17], OAM beam used for objects manipulation [18][19][20][21][22][23], acoustic analogy of supper radiant of Kerr black hole [24,25] etc.…”

Design, fabrication and actuation of magneto-acoustic microrobots: een deel magnetisch, een ander deel akoestisch, allebei fantastisch

“…SAW-I devices often require planar micromachined transducers synthesized using photolithography, and are aimed at tissue engineering and lab-on-a-chip applications [91]. The distribution of transducers varies from rectangular [164], [169] to circular [178], [180], [188] morphology to trap particles at desired focal points like an optical lens. Owing to this functional similarity with optical tweezers, this class of manipulation devices are referred as acoustic tweezers [42], [164], [179].…”

“…3.3b) and Bessel beam manipulators [178] with a focal point providing greater accessibility to the workspace. With the advent of rapid prototyping and fabrication techniques, the one-sided Bessel manipulators have matured into more intricately designed monolithic transducers that function as acoustic vortex traps [180] and holographic lenses [181].…”