Novel platform allows five types of programmable optothermal manipulation of micro- and nanoparticles

Researchers have developed an optothermal platform with five manipulation modes - printing, tweezing, rotating, rolling, and shooting - using a single Gaussian laser beam. Switching between the different modes is achieved by simply tuning the optical power or the distance between laser and object, and can be automated through software programming. This novel multimodal manipulation technique relies on the coordination of multiple thermal forces instead of light-matter interactions, i.e., the mechanism of traditional optical tweezers.