Manipulation of gold nanorods with dual-optical tweezers for surface plasmon resonance control

Gold nanorods are too tiny to be manipulated using conventional mechanical methods. In this paper, we demonstrate the trapping, transferring, positioning and patterning of gold nanorods with dual-optical tweezers. The convenient manipulations are achieved by taking advantage of the longitudinal surface plasmon resonance of gold nanorods and the anisotropic optical trapping forces formed by two linearly polarized Gaussian beams. The trapped gold nanoparticles are positioned extremely firmly and quickly on a substrate compared with randomly dispersed ones. It is observed that gold nanorods show advantages over gold nanospheres with regard to positioning speed and stability. More importantly, versatile plasmon coupling effects have been achieved in some patterned nanorods.