Ultrasonic fields are able to exert forces on cells and other micron-scale particles, including microbubbles. The technology is compatible with existing lab-on-chip techniques and is complementary to many alternative manipulation approaches due to its ability to handle many cells simultaneously over extended length scales. This paper provides an overview of the physical principles underlying ul...

For decades, singular beams carrying angular momentum have been a topic of considerable interest. Their intriguing applications are ubiquitous in a variety of fields, ranging from optical manipulation to photon entanglement, and from microscopy and coronagraphy to free-space communications, detection of rotating black holes, and even relativistic electrons and strong-field physics. In most appl...

The purely optical manipulation of particles has gained increasing interest in recent years. Especially the combination of optical manipulation with microfluidics offers new possibilities, such as the contamination-free handling of micrometer-sized particles in biology and medicine without any mechanical contact. VCSELs (vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers) are an excellent choice for optic...

Microfludic devices with integrated electrical detection will enable fast, low-cost or portable sensing and processing of biological and chemical samples. As an inherent property of microfabrication, microelectrical impedance spectroscopy detectors can take advantage of AC electrokinetics for particle manipulation, leading to enhanced sensitivity. Preliminary experiments on particle detection w...

This fluid dynamics video will illustrate an optically induced electrokinetic technique for non-invasive particle manipulation on the surface of a parallel-plate gold/indium tin oxide (ITO) electrode that is illuminated with near-infrared (1064 nm) optical patterns and biased with an alternating current (AC) signal. This technique generates strong microfluidic vortices that is constructively us...

In this paper, a new modeling approach for Dielectrophoresis (DEP) based particle manipulation is presented. The proposed method fulfills missing links in finite element modeling between the multiphysic simulation and the biological behavior. This technique is amongst the first steps to develop a more complex platform covering several types of manipulations such as magnetophoresis and optics. T...

The possibility to generate acoustic modes based on FPWs (Flexural Plate Waves) in a generic non-piezoelectric substrate for microfludic applications by means of piezoelectric actuators has been explored and described in this paper. The FPW acoustic modes are generated by means of actuators made of Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) layers with InterDigital Transducers (IDTs) screen-printed on alumi...

To study acoustic microfluidic particle manipulation, a microfluidic channel was designed in AutoCAD and fabricated in a silicon wafer using potassium hydroxide etching and other cleanroom techniques. The first channel created was destructively tested and its fabrication techniques characterized; future channel development is outlined.

We investigate the problem of using contact sensors to estimate the pose of an object during planar pushing by a fixed-shape hand. Contact sensors are unique because they inherently discriminate between “contact” and “no-contact” configurations. As a result, the set of object configurations that activates a sensor constitutes a lower-dimensional contact manifold in the configuration space of th...