Scalable trapping of single nanosized extracellular vesicles using plasmonics

Heterogeneous nanoscale particles released by cells known as extracellular vesicles (EVs) are actively investigated for early disease detection1, monitoring2, and advanced therapeutics3. Due to their extremely small size, the stable trapping of nano-sized EVs using diffraction-limited optical tweezers4 has been met with challenges. Plasmon-enhanced optical trapping can confine light to the nanoscale to generate tight trapping potentials. Unfortunately, a long-standing challenge is that plasmonic tweezers have limited throughput and cannot provide rapid delivery and trapping of particles at plasmonic hotspots while precluding the intrinsic plasmon-induced photothermal heating effect at the same time. We report our original geometry-induced electrohydrodynamic tweezers (GET) that generate multiple electrohydrodynamic potentials for the parallelized transport and trapping of single EVs in parallel within seconds while enhancing the imaging of single trapped EVs. We show that the integration of nanoscale plasmonic cavities at the center of each GET trap results in the parallel placement of single EVs near plasmonic cavities enabling instantaneous plasmon-enhanced optical trapping upon laser illumination without any detrimental heating effect for the first time. These non-invasive scalable hybrid nanotweezers open new horizons for high-throughput tether-free plasmon-enhanced single EV trapping and spectroscopy. Other potential areas of impact include nanoplastics characterization, and scalable hybrid integration for quantum photonics.