Plasmonic Control of Analyte Motion

Despite the fact that analyte manipulation can have great applications in different research fields, most techniques used for this still present some limitations. Plasmonic nanostructures can be used to try and overcome this, but they lack the ability to manipulate objects over long distances. In this paper we therefore present different geometries for Brownian ratchet devices that are able to not only optically trap, but also to manipulate over long distances, dielectric nanometer-sized beads by periodically modulating an external light source.