Optical control of zeolite-L-nanocontainer-based waveguides and sensors

Zeolite L crystals are porous microsized nanocontainer, featuring a huge number of strictly one-dimensional aligned nano-channels across the whole crystal axis. Zeolite L are highly interesting as building hierarchically ordered blocks for microsystems and microdevices because they can achieve sophisticated functionalities when they are arranged in specific configurations and accommodate different guest molecules, as e.g. organic dyes or drugs, within their nano-pores. It has been used an elegant means to fabricate functional microsystems based on zeolite L crystals by using multiple optical tweezers to precisely translate, rotate [1] and arrange several crystals in any desired two or three dimensional configuration [2]. In our contribution, we will further develop this strategy by exploiting the full optical control over each individual constituent that holographic optical tweezers provide. We will demonstrate exciting applications of dynamic optical manipulated microsystems based on zeolite L nanocontainers, as optical waveguides and shutters. [1] M. Woerdemann et al., Adv. Mater. 22, 4176 (2010) [2] M. Veiga-Gutiérrez et al., Adv. Mater. 24, 5199 (2012)