Abstract
We demonstrate the micromanipulation of RBC’s into a tapered fiber-optic trap for the transport into and out of the optical tweezers trap in an orthogonal geometry. The tapered fiber tip was fabricated by chemical etching. The other end of the tapered fiber was coupled to a near-infrared fiber Laser delivering power up to 100 mW. Part of the fiber Laser beam (up to 300 mW) was coupled to a high numerical aperture microscope objective for optical tweezers trapping. For a small cone angle of the tip, the red blood cells were found to be trapped two-dimensionally and pushed along the axial direction by dominance of the scattering force. This was found to be consistent with the estimated axial forces caused by beam profiles emerging from the small-cone tapered fiber tip. During the micromanipulation of RBC’s into the optical tweezers trap the fiber tip was placed ~30 microns away from the tweezers trap. Since the tapered tip can be easily integrated onto a microfluidic channel, the proposed configuration can find potential applications in lab-on-a-chip devices. Currently, we are pursuing high-throughput transport analysis of the red blood cells using this system.
© 2011 Optical Society of America
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