Electric tweezers: Arbitrary dielectrophoresis based positioning and orientation of sub-micron particles

The manipulation of individual micrometer-sized objects has been the focus of significant research efforts over the last few years. In this work a novel technique for the arbitrary manipulation of nanoparticles is experimentally demonstrated. This method employs dielectrophoretic forces for the planar control of the motion and orientation of nanoparticles between a set of microfabricated electrodes. While dielectrophoresis is a well known phenomenon, in the past it has only been used passively, wherein the particles are observed, but not controlled. Here we develop an algorithm to calculate the voltage to apply to each element of the electrodes array to create voltage distributions at the positions of the particles that will yield the particle motions that we desire. This is demonstrated on submicron gold nanorods and glass microbeads