Light-Gated Manipulation of Micro/Nanoparticles in Electric Fields

The rapid development of micro/nanomanipulation technologies has opened unprecedented opportunities for the sorting, assembly, and actuation of biological and inorganic entities for applications ranging from live-cell separation, drug screening, biosensing to micro/nanomachines and nanorobots. To this end, remarkable progress has been made in the development of efficient, precise, and versatile nanomanipulation techniques based on individual or combined chemical and physical fields. Among them, techniques that fuse light stimuli with electric (E) fields, have achieved impressive performance in the versatility, reconfigurability, and throughput in the manipulation of both biological and inorganic micro/nanoscale objects compared to those of many other manipulation techniques, by leveraging the strong optoelectric coupling effect of semiconductor materials. This work provides a review of various types of light-gated electric manipulation systems - the working principles, experimental setups, limitations, applications, and future perspectives.