Nanophotonic and Nanoplasmonic Tweezers: Trapping, Sensing, and Manipulation

Dear Colleagues,

Optical trapping (or, optical tweezers) has become a core technique widely used in biophysics (to study fundamental biological processes), nanoengineering, and nanochemistry (to study and build materials from single molecules), and quantum optomechanics (to study the interaction of single particles with light), on size scales ranging from sub-nm (single-molecule level) to tens of microns (cellular level). The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Arthur Ashkin for the discovery and development of optical tweezers and their applications to biological systems.

Recent advances in nanotechnology have led to flourish in the development of exciting new classes of ‘on-chip’ optical traps: ‘nanophotonic tweezers’ and ‘nanoplasmonic tweezers’. Researchers around the world have invented numerous miniaturized, on-chip optical traps in ingenious ways. These new designs create optical trapping centers beyond the diffraction limit of light by leveraging the strong optical field enhancements in nanostructures such as nanophotonic waveguides, photonic crystal resonators, and nanoplasmonic resonators. These on-chip optical traps can be readily integrated with microfluidics, permitting increasingly complex single-molecule and single-cell studies.

This Special Issue welcomes contributions related to on-chip optical trapping, including but not limited to designing novel on-chip optical traps, and applications of nanophotonic/nanoplasmonic tweezers in the manipulation of micro-/nanoparticles or biological single molecules/cells, and biochemical sensing. The Special Issue will accept diverse forms of contributions, including rapid research papers on theoretical or experimental studies and short review articles.

Dr. Fan Ye
Prof. Dr. Jie Ma 
Guest Editors

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• nanophotonic tweezers
• nanophotonic trapping
• nanoplasmonic tweezers
• nanoplasmonic trapping
• plasmonic optical tweezers
• on-chip optical trapping
• on-chip optical tweezers
• nanophotonic/nanoplasmonic manipulation/sensing