Optical Force Positioning and Aggregation of Nanoparticles

Optical forces are used to position and aggregate nanoparticles for different applications. In particular, plasmonic enhanced optical forces are exploited to direct gold nanorods surrounded by biomolecules to create hot-spots on demand in a liquid buffered environment. This enables protein detection at the 10 nM level. Furthermore, optical forces on liquid phase exfoliated layered materials (hBN, MoS2, WS2) are studied and used to push and aggregate nanostructures in specific patterns.