Xiaolu Zhu

By Xiaolu Zhu and Yifei Yang

The optoelectronic tweezers (or optically induced dielectrophoresis (DEP)) have showed the ability to parallelly position a large number of colloidal microparticles without any template. The microparticles can be trapped and driven by the dielectrophoretic forces induced by the optical micropatterns in OET devices. In this chapter, the design and fabrication of flat optoelectronic devices (FOD) and hybrid optoelectronic device (HOD) are described. In the typical FOD, the manipulation modes including filtering, transporting, concentrating and focusing controlling regimes are experimentally demonstrated and analyzed. The controllable rotation of self-assembled microparticle chains in FOD has also been investigated, and a method incorporating the optically induced electrorotation (OER) and AC electroosmotic (ACEO) effects is numerically and experimentally implemented for manipulating microparticle chains. Based on the above research of FOD, a hybrid DEP microdevice HOD is conceptually and experimentally proposed. The HOD integrates with metallic microelectrode layer and the underneath photoconductive layer with projected optical virtual electrodes. FOD and HOD hybrid device enables the active driving, large-scale patterning and local position adjustment of microparticles. These techniques make up the shortcoming of low flexibility of traditional metallic microelectrodes and integrate the merits of both the metal electrode-induced and microimage-induced DEP techniques.

Part of the book: Optoelectronics