Abstract: Short pulse lasers with pulse width from nano- to femto-seconds have widely applications across areas including laser machining, cell surgery, and recently in micro and nanofluidics. It has been shown that a tightly focused laser beam is capable of disrupting water medium directly and inducing localized hot plasma for rapid heating and creating cavitation bubbles. These bubbles expand at speeds up to hundred meters per second in the micro and nanometer scale. Through proper engineering designs, such ultrafast micro-fluidic phenomena can be utilized for actuating ultrafast micro-fluidic devices to enable new functionalities not possible with micro and nanofluidic devices. By coupling this photo-thermal effect with metallic nanostructures, the threshold energy for exciting cavitation bubbles can be greatly reduced and the patterns of bubble explosion can be controlled in the nanometer scale. Several micro and nanofluidic devices utilizing high speed plasmonic photo-thermal effects will be presented including ultrafast micro-fluidic switches, plasmonic photo-thermal pipette for single cell surgery, and a platform for multiplexed macromolecule delivery into target cells using optical image patterns. This talk will also cover the recent development of optoelectronic tweezers (OET) for massively parallel optical manipulation of single cells, biomolecules, as well as liquid droplets.
Prof. Eric P. Y. Chiou received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department from the University of California at Berkeley in 2005. He received his M.S. degree from the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles and B.S. degree in the Mechanical Engineering Department from National Taiwan University in Taiwan in 1998. He joined the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006. His research interest is in nanophotonics, bio-photonics, and BioMEMS. His invention of Optoelectronic Tweezers (OET) is selected by R&D Magazine and Micro/Nano Newsletter as representative of the best 25 micro- and nanotechnologies of 2006. He has received the NSF CAREER award in 2008.
