Optical microfluidics

We present a method for the control of small droplets based on the thermal Marangoni effect using laser heating. With this approach, droplets covering five orders of magnitude in volume (∼1.7μL to 14 pL), immersed in decanol, were moved on an unmodified polystyrene surface, with speeds of up to 3 mm/s. When two droplets were brought into contact, they spontaneously fused and rapidly mixed in less than 33 ms. This optically addressed microfluidic approach has many advantages for microfluidic transport, including exceptional reconfigurability, low intersample contamination, large volume range, extremely simple substrates, no electrical connections, and ready scaling to large arrays.