Optical positioning and linking for rapid prototyping and nanofabrication

Our optical positioning and linking (OPAL) platform is based on optical tweezers and can assemble sub-micron heterogeneous materials in three dimensions (3D). OPAL is fully automated and can position hundreds of particles according to a set of desired predetermined coordinates. After positioning, particles are permanently liked together via biotin-avidin chemistry. We present how the fabrication speed, positional accuracy, and error rate depend on process parameters. The rapid prototyping of metamaterials and nanostructured optical chemical sensors will be discussed, as well as novel computational design approaches for these devices based on the discrete dipole approximation.