Integration of plasmonic trapping in a microfluidic environment

Near field generated by plasmonic structures has recently been proposed to trap small objects. We report the first integration of plasmonic trapping with microfluidics for lab-on-a-chip applications. A three-layer plasmo-microfluidic chip is used to demonstrate the trapping of polystyrene spheres and yeast cells. This technique enables cell immobilization without the complex optics required for conventional optical tweezers. The benefits of such devices are optical simplicity, low power consumption and compactness; they have great potential for implementing novel functionalities for advanced manipulations and analytics in lab-on-a-chip applications. (C) 2009 Optical Society of Americ