Massive laser pulling of graphene nanosheets in water

Abstract

Light manipulation of graphene-based materials attracts much attentions. As a new light manipulation concept, optical pulling develops rapidly in the past decade. However, optical pulling of graphene in liquid is rarely reported. In this work, laser pulling of graphene nanosheets (GN) in pure water by using common gauss beams is presented. This phenomenon holds for multiple incident laser wavelengths including 405 nm, 488 nm, 532 nm and 650 nm. A particle image velocimetry software PIVlab is adopted to analyze the velocity field information of GN. The laser pulling velocity of the GN is approximately ∼ 0.5 mm/s corresponding to ∼ 103 body length/s, which increases with an increase of the incident laser energy. This work presents a contactless mothed to massively pull microscale graphene materials in simple liquid, which supplies a potential manipulation technique for micro-nanofluidic devices and also provides a platform to investigate laser-graphene interaction in a simple liquid phase medium.