Comparison of silicon photonic crystal resonator designs for optical trapping of nanomaterials

X Serey, S Mandal and D Erickson

The use of silicon photonic devices for optical manipulation has recently enabled the direct handling of objects like nucleic acids and nanoparticles that are much smaller than could previously be trapped using traditional laser tweezers. The ability to manipulate even smaller matter however requires the development of photonic structures with even stronger trapping potentials. In this work we investigate theoretically several photonic crystal resonator designs and characterize the achievable trapping stiffness and trapping potential depth (sometimes referred to as the trapping stability). Two effects are shown to increase these trapping parameters: field enhancement in the resonator and strong field containment. We find trapping stiffness as high as 22.3 pN nm − 1 for 100 nm polystyrene beads as well as potential depth of 51 000 kBT at T = 300 K, for one Watt of power input to the bus waveguide. Under the same conditions for 70 nm polystyrene beads, we find a stiffness of 69 pN nm − 1 and a potential depth of 177 000 kBT. Our calculations suggest that with input power of 10 mW we could trap particles as small as 7.7 nm diameter with a trapping depth of 500 kBT. We expect these traps to eventually enable the manipulation of small matter such as single proteins, carbon nanotubes and metallic nanoparticles.

DOI