Surface tension-enhanced optical trapping for lateral close-packing

Here we present our initial study of a surface tension-enhanced optical trapping for lateral close-packing of dielectric objects. This is a novel approach to optically trap multiple micro-scale objects even with a lower intensity of the beam. Such lateral close-packing by indirect optical trapping was stably formed without splitting a single gradient beam into several optical trapping arrays. This technique would be contributed to study cell-to-cell interactions and cell fusion dynamics of living cells in nano- and micro-fluidic environments.