Electrical forces for manipulating cells at the microscale include electrophoresis and dielectrophoresis. Electrophoretic forces arise from the interaction of a cell's charge and an electric field, whereas dielectrophoresis arises from a cell's polarizability. Both forces can be used to create microsystems that separate cell mixtures into its component cell types or act as electrical "handles" ...

Interfacial polarization in electrolytes or other ionic media is a very well known phenomenon in the connection to the relative surface potential difference. Nevertheless, the created space charge affects the distribution of charge carriers in the electrolyte itself similarly to the field effects in semiconductors. This results in the number of secondary effects from the dielectrophoresis to th...

Using gold electrodes lithographically fabricated onto microscope cover slips, DNA and proteins are interrogated both optically (through fluorescence) and electronically (through conductance measurements). Dielectrophoresis is used to position the DNA and proteins at well-defined positions on a chip. Quadrupole electrode geometries are investigated with gaps ranging from 3 to 100 microm; field ...

We report observations of a new electric fieldand shear-induced many-body phenomenon in the behavior of suspensions. Its origin is dielectrophoresis accompanied by the field-induced phase separation. As a result, a suspension undergoes a field-driven phase separation leading to the formation of a distinct boundary between regions enriched with and depleted of particles. The theoretical predicti...

Dielectrophoresis is an efficient technique often used to handle or trap micro-/nano-particles within microfluidic devices. For that purpose, arrays of insulating materials disposed between polarization electrodes are classically used to generate the necessary dielectrophoresis forces. In this paper, a novel method is proposed where metallic micro dots are arrayed to generate strong field inhom...

Rectifying diodes of single nanobelt/nanowire-based devices have been fabricated by aligning single ZnO nanobelts/nanowires across paired Au electrodes using dielectrophoresis. A current of 0.5 microA at 1.5 V forward bias has been received, and the diode can bear an applied voltage of up to 10 V. The ideality factor of the diode is approximately 3, and the on-to-off current ratio is as high as...

Dielectrophoresis can potentially be used as an efficient trapping tool in the fabrication of molecular devices. For nanoscale objects, however, the Brownian motion poses a challenge. We show that the use of carbon nanotube electrodes makes it possible to apply relatively low trapping voltages and still achieve high enough field gradients for trapping nanoscale objects, e.g., single molecules. ...