Parallel and selective trapping in a patterned plasmonic landscape

The implementation of optical tweezers at a surface opens a huge potential towards the elaboration of future lab-on-a-chip devices entirely operated with light. The transition from conventional three-dimensional (3D) tweezers to 2D is made possible by exploiting evanescent fields bound at interfaces. In particular, surface plasmons (SP) at metal/dielectric interfaces are expected to be excellent candidates to relax the requirements on incident power and to achieve subwavelength trapping volumes. Here, we report on novel 2D SP-based optical tweezers formed by finite gold areas fabricated at a glass surface. We demonstrate that SP enable stable trapping of single dielectric beads under unfocused illumination with considerably reduced laser intensity compared with conventional optical tweezers. We show that the method can be extended to parallel trapping over any predefined pattern. Finally, we demonstrate how SP tweezers can be designed to selectively trap one type of particles out of a mixture, acting as an efficient optical sieve.