Photonic Sensing: Principles and Applications for Safety and Security Monitoring

Chapter 3

Optofluidic Techniques for the Manipulation of Micro Particles: Principles and Applications to Bioanalyses

Honglei Guo

University of Ottawa, Microwave Photonics Research Laboratory, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Gaozhi Xiao

Institute for Microstructural Sciences, National Research Council Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Jianping Yao

University of Ottawa, Microwave Photonics Research Laboratory, Ottawa, ON, Canada

3.1 Introduction

The emerging needs required by the rapid pathogen detection, clinical diagnosis, and forensic science necessitate the development of lab-on-a-chip devices, which integrate laboratory functions and processes, and scale down the testing systems to a miniaturized chip format [1]. Proper manipulation and handling of the microsized bioparticles is regarded as one of the most challenging problems to biologists, medics, and colloidal physicists [2]. In the last decade, several techniques have been reported to achieve this, including the pressure-driven flow [3], electrophoresis [4], and optoelectronic tweezer [5]. In recent years, optofluidics, which is described as the combination of both optics and fluidics on a chip platform, has become a rapidly developing research area for the manipulation of microbioparticles owing to its advantages such as strong dependence on particle size, velocity and optical properties, extremely high optical trapping stability, and insensitivity to surface condition. Meanwhile, optofluidic techniques are benefited from the mature fabrication ...