Speckle Tweezers for Simultaneous Controlling of Low and High Refractive Index Micro-particles

Abstract

Manipulation of micro and nanoscale particles suspended in a fluidic medium is one among the defining goals of modern nanotechnology. Speckle tweezers (ST) by incorporating randomly distributed light fields have been used to apply detectable limits on the Brownian motion of micro-particles with refractive indices higher than their medium. Indeed, compared to periodic potentials, ST represents a wider possibility to be operated for such tasks. Here, we extend the usefulness of ST into low index micro-particles. Repelling of such particles by high intensity regions into lower intensity regions makes them to be locally confined, and the confinement can be tuned by changing the average grain intensity and size of the speckle patterns. Experiments on polystyrenes and liposomes validate the procedure. Moreover, we show that ST can be used to nano-particle (NP)-loaded liposomes. Interestingly, the different interactions of NP-loaded and empty liposomes with ST enables collective manipulation of their mixture using the same speckle pattern, which may be explained by inclusion of the photophoretic forces on NPs in NP-loaded liposomes. Our results on the different behavior between empty and non-empty vesicles may open a new window on controlling collective transportation of drug micro-containers along with its wide applications in soft matter.