Figure 16.2 — Microfluidic sorting in a optical lattice

Fig. 16.2 — Microfluidic sorting in a optical lattice
Fig. 16.2 — Microfluidic sorting in a optical lattice. Two particle species with different properties (e.g., size, refractive index) flow from B to D in a microfluidic circuit. The optomechanical interaction with an optical lattice in the fractionation chamber pushes one species into the upper stream of the laminar flow from chamber A, sorting and collecting them into chamber C. The picture on the right shows the optical sorting by size of drug delivery agents (microcapsules): the black tracks show the deflection of 2 μm-diameter protein microcapsules flowing at 20 μm/s from left to right across the optical landscape; a 4 μm-diameter microcapsule (white track) of the same material is nearly unaffected by the interaction with the optical lattice.
Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: MacDonald et al., Nature 426, 421–4, copyright 2003.