Tweezing and manipulating micro- and nanoparticles by optical nonlinear endoscopy

Two-photon absorption can dramatically enhance the trapping force applied to fluorescent nanobeads and metallic nanoparticles. Min Gu and co-workers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia say that their fibre-based optical nonlinear endoscopic tweezers, which exploit two-photon absorption, can provide a trapping force that is three to four orders of magnitude stronger than usual. Their device could therefore be a potentially important tool for in vivo biomedical studies. In principle, the nonlinear tweezers allow large amounts of gold nanorods to be delivered rapidly to a desired location, for example to kill cancerous cells. This allows operation with a near-infrared source at the peak in transmission of biological tissue (800 nm), thus allowing greater penetration and reduced photodamage in the surrounding area.

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