Photothermal Transport of DNA in Entropy-Landscape Plasmonic Waveguides

The ability to handle single, free molecules in lab-on-a-chip systems is key to the development of advanced biotechnologies. Entropic confinement offers passive control of polymers in nanofluidic systems by locally asserting a molecule’s number of available conformation states through structured landscapes.

Separately, a range of plasmonic configurations have demonstrated active manipulation of nano-objects by harnessing concentrated electric fields. The integration of these two independent techniques promises a range of sophisticated and complementary functions to handle, for example, DNA, but numerous difficulties, in particular, conflicting requirements of channel size, have prevented progress. Here, we show that metallic V-groove waveguides, embedded in fluidic nanoslits, form entropic potentials that trap and guide DNA molecules over well-defined routes while simultaneously promoting photothermal transport of DNA through the losses of plasmonic modes.

The propulsive forces, assisted by in-coupling to propagating channel plasmon polaritons, extend along the V-grooves with a directed motion up to ≈0.5 μm·mW–1 away from the input beam and λ-DNA velocities reaching ≈0.2 μm·s–1·mW–1. The entropic trapping enables the V-grooves to be flexibly loaded and unloaded with DNA by variation of transverse fluid flow, a process that is selective to biopolymers versus fixed-shape objects and also allows the technique to address the challenges of nanoscale interaction volumes.

Our self-aligning, light-driven actuator provides a convenient platform to filter, route, and manipulate individual molecules and may be realized wholly by wafer-scale fabrication suitable for parallelized investigation.