Chip-based optical tweezers manipulate microparticles and cells from a distance

Optical traps and tweezers can be used to capture and manipulate particles using non-contact forces. A focused beam of light allows precise control over the position of and force applied to an object, at the micron scale or below, enabling particles to be pulled and captured by the beam.

Optical manipulation techniques are garnering increased interest for biological applications. Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have now developed a miniature, chip-based optical trap that acts as a “tractor beam” for studying DNA, classifying cells and investigating disease mechanisms. The device – which is small enough to fit in your hand – is made from a silicon-photonics chip and can manipulate particles up to 5 mm away from the chip surface, while maintaining a sterile environment for cells.

The promise of integrated optical tweezers

Integrated optical trapping provides a compact route to accessible optical manipulation compared with bulk optical tweezers, and has already been demonstrated using planar waveguides, optical resonators and plasmonic devices. However, many such tweezers can only trap particles directly on (or within several microns of) the chip’s surface and only offer passive trapping.

To make optical traps sterile for cell research, 150-µm thick glass coverslips are required. However, the short focal heights of many integrated optical tweezers means that the light beams can’t penetrate into standard sample chambers. Because such devices can only trap particles a few microns above the chip, they are incompatible with biological research that requires particles and cells to be trapped at much larger distances from the chip’s surface.

With current approaches, the only way to overcome this is to remove the cells and place them on the surface of the chip itself. This process contaminates the chip, however, meaning that each chip must be discarded after use and a new chip used for every experiment.

Trapping device for biological particles

Lead author Tal Sneh and colleagues developed an integrated optical phased array (OPA) that can focus emitted light at a specific point in the radiative near field of the chip. To date, many OPA devices have been motivated by LiDAR and optical communications applications, so their capabilities were limited to steering light beams in the far field using linear phase gradients. However, this approach does not generate the tightly focused beam required for optical trapping.

In their new approach, the MIT researchers used semiconductor manufacturing processes to fabricate a series of micro-antennas onto the chip. By creating specific phase patterns for each antenna, the researchers found that they could generate a tightly focused beam of light.

Each antenna’s optical signal was also tightly controlled by varying the input laser wavelength to provide an active spatial tuning for tweezing particles. The focused light beam emitted by the chip could therefore be shaped and steered to capture particles located millimetres above the surface of the chip, making it suitable for biological studies.

The researchers used the OPA tweezers to optically steer and non-mechanically trap polystyrene microparticles at up to 5 mm above the chip’s surface. They also demonstrated stretching of mouse lymphoblast cells, in the first known cell experiment to use single-beam integrated optical tweezers.

The researchers point out that this is the first demonstration of trapping particles over millimetre ranges, with the operating distance of the new device orders of magnitude greater than other integrated optical tweezers. Plasmonic, waveguide and resonator tweezers, for example, can only operate at 1 µm above the surface, while microlens-based tweezers have been able to operate at 20 µm distances.

Importantly, the device is completely reusable and biocompatible, because the biological samples can be trapped and undergo manipulation while remaining within a sterile coverslip. This ensures that both the biological media and the chip stay free from contamination without needing complex microfluidics packaging.

The work in this study provides a new type of modality for integrated optical tweezers, expanding their use into the biological domain to perform experiments on proteins and DNA, for example, as well as to sort and manipulate cells.

The researchers say that they hope to build on this research by creating a device with an adjustable focal height for the light beam, as well as introduce multiple trap sites to manipulate biological particles in more complex ways and employ the device to examine more biological systems.

The optical trap is described in Nature Communications.