Optothermal Manipulation in a Cooled Cuvette

Experiments and numerical simulation demonstrate the feasibility of forming convective currents to capture and transfer 2.9 μm polystyrene microspheres in a cuvette cooled down to 5°C. The velocity of the currents is shown to depend on the gradient of temperature regardless of its initial level. Furthermore, the temperature in the manipulation region can drop to between 25 and 35°C. These results were obtained for point and ring optothermal traps.