Processing carbon nanotubes with holographic optical tweezers

摘要

We report the first demonstration that carbon nanotubes can be trapped andmanipulated by optical tweezers. This observation is surprising becauseindividual nanotubes are substantially smaller than the wavelength of light,and thus should not be amenable to optical trapping. Even so, nanotube bundles,and perhaps even individual nanotubes, can be transported at high speeds,deposited onto substrates, untangled, and selectively ablated, all with visiblelight. The use of holographic optical tweezers, capable of creating hundreds ofindependent traps simultaneously, suggests opportunities for highly parallelnanotube processing with light.