Nano-optical trapping by resonant optical antennas of Rayleigh particles and E-coli bacteria

Trapping living microorganisms at designated positions in space is important to study their metabolism and to initiate an in-situ scrutiny of the complexity of life at the nanoscale. While optical tweezers enable to trap large cells at the focus of a laser beam, they face difficulties in maintaining them steady and can become invasive and produce substantial damage that prevents preserving the organisms intact for sufficient time to be studied. Here we demonstrate a novel optical trapping scheme that allows us to hold living E-coli bacteria for times of several hours using moderate light intensities. We pattern metallic nanoantennas on a glass substrate to produce strong light intensity gradients responsible for the trapping mechanism. Several individual bacteria are trapped simultaneously, with their orientation fixed by the asymmetry of the antennas. This unprecedented immobilization of bacteria opens an avenue towards observing nanoscopic processes associated to cell metabolism, as well as the response of individual live microorganisms to external stimuli, much in the same way as pluricellular organisms are studied in biology.