Optical Trapping Separation of Chiral Nanoparticles by Subwavelength Slot Waveguides

Enantiomer separation opens great opportunities to develop the technologies of pharmaceutics, chemicals, and biomedicine, but faces daunting challenges. Here, we discover a considerable chiral-dependent trapping force to separate nanometer-scale enantiomers in a new silicon-based waveguide platform. The electromagnetic chirality gradient of strongly confined evanescent fields can be largely enhanced by the counterpropagating slot waveguides so that the resulting chiral gradient forces can shift the trapping equilibrium positions of dielectric gradient forces. Especially, there exists a transitional width for the slot waveguides to exchange the trapping equilibrium positions between two opposite enantiomers. Our thoroughly numerical investigations demonstrate that the chiral-separable slot waveguides here can offer high efficiency and feasibility of separating chiral nanoparticles, and may pave a route toward new on-chip chiral optical tweezers or optofluidic transport systems for large-scale chiral separation.