Nanowerk   September 8, 2023 Optical tweezers are used from manufacturing to biotechnology. However, the requirement of refractive index contrast and high laser power results in potential photon and thermal damage to the trapped objects. Optothermal tweezers have been developed to trap particles and biological cells via opto-thermophoresis with much lower laser powers. But the intense laser heating and stringent requirement of the solution environment prevent their use for general biological applications. A team of researchers in the US (UT Austin, UT Dallas) has proposed hypothermal opto-thermophoretic tweezers (HOTTs) to achieve low-power trapping of diverse colloids and biological cells in their […]