We show that graphene nanoribbons (GNR) with tunable mid-infrared (MIR) plasmonic resonances can be utilized to form an electrically controlled plasmonic conveyor belt network to simultaneously and independently trap and transport multiple nanoscale objects with high performance. Furthermore, such a GNR plasmonic conveyor belt network can induce tunable bipolar (i.e., trapping or repulsive) optical gradient forces on nanoscale objects made of materials with strong permittivity dispersions in the MIR spectral region. The tunable bipolar optical forces can be exploited to achieve selective filtering, sorting and fractionation of nanoscale objects in a mixture based on their material compositions and/or microscopic structures.
We propose and demonstrate the feasibility of employing a tunable graphene nano-ribbon plasmonic network for optically trapping and transporting nano-particles within the network. In contrast to conventional metal-based plasmonic tweezers which require varying the excitation light source to achieve manipulation of trapped objects, our proposed graphene nano-ribbon plamonic network realizes accurately controlled transportation of trapped nano-particles via electrostatically tuning the carrier density distribution in the graphene network. Plane-wave excitation of the plasmonic resonances of graphene nano-ribbons at 1mW per square micrometer intensity level is sufficient to generate a trapping potential larger than 10kT at room temperature for nano-particles with a sub-100nm diameter.
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