We present an analytical study in the structure-modulated plasmonic angular momentum, which is trapped in the core region of a sectorial indefinite metamaterial. This metamaterial consists of periodically arranged metal-dielectric nano-wedges along the azimuthal direction. Employing a transfer-matrix calculation and a conformal-mapping technique, our theory can deal with an arbitrary number of ...

Graphene plasmons are rapidly emerging as a versatile platform for manipulating light at the deep subwavelength scale. Here we show numerically that strong optical near-field forces can be generated under the illumination of mid-IR light when dielectric nanoparticles are located in the vicinity of a nanostructured graphene film. These near-field forces are attributed to the excitation of the gr...

Manipulation of biological cells becomes increasingly important in biomedical engineering to address challenge issues in cell-cell interaction, drug discovery, and tissue engineering. Significant demand for both accuracy and productivity in cell manipulation highlights the need for automated cell transportation with integrated robotics and micro/nano manipulation technologies. Optical tweezers,...

A microfluidic-based directed assembly strategy is employed to form highly aligned supramolecular structures. Formation of aligned synthetic oligopeptide nanostructures is accomplished using planar extensional flow, which induces alignment of underlying material suprastructures. Fluidic-directed assembly of supramolecular structures allows for unprecedented manipulation at the nano- and mesosca...

In the past two decades, we have witnessed significant progress in developing high performance stimuli-responsive polymeric materials. This review focuses on recent developments in the preparation and application of patterned stimuli-responsive polymers, including thermoresponsive layers, pH/ionic-responsive hydrogels, photo-responsive film, magnetically-responsive composites, electroactive com...

Metals of hybrid nano-/microstructures are of broad technological and fundamental interests. Manipulation of shape and composition on the nanoscale, however, is challenging, especially for multicomponent alloys such as metallic glasses. Although top-down approaches have demonstrated nanomoulding, they are limited to very few alloy systems. Here we report a facile method to synthesize metallic g...

We introduce the Standing Wave Optical Line Trap (SWOLT) as a novel tool for precise optical manipulation and long-range transport of nano-scale objects at low laser power. We show that positioning and transport along the trap can be achieved by controlling the lateral component of the scattering force while the confinement of the particles by the gradient force remains unaffected. Multiple gol...

Plasmonics, a rapidly emerging subdiscipline of nanophotonics, is aimed at exploiting surface plasmons for important applications, including sensing, waveguiding, and imaging. Parallel to these research efforts, technology yielding enhanced scattering and absorption of localized surface plasmons (LSPs) provides promising routes for trapping and manipulation of micro and nano scale particles, as...

Frequency combs, millions of narrow-linewidth optical modes referenced to an atomic clock, have shown remarkable potential in time/frequency metrology, atomic/molecular spectroscopy and precision LIDARs. Applications have extended to coherent nonlinear Raman spectroscopy of molecules and quantum metrology for entangled atomic qubits. Frequency combs will create novel possibilities in nano-photo...

The architecture optimization of a newly designed flexure XY parallel micro-manipulator with both input and output decoupling is conducted in this paper. In view of the compliance of flexure hinges, the input stiffness model of the motion stage are established based upon the matrix method, and then the dynamic equation is derived through the Lagrangian approach, which is verified by the modal a...