Monolayer Conveyor for Stably Trapping and Transporting Sub-1 nm Particles

Efficient manipulation of nanoparticles and single molecules has always been of great interest and potential in nanotechnology. However, many challenges still remain in effectively functionalizing structures for this purpose. In this work, taking advantage of graphene's Dirac plasmon for its extreme confinement and tunability, a monolayer conveyor along which the position of optical potential well can be dynamically controlled is theoretically proposed. It is shown that by tuning a single voltage, one can manipulate the resonance along the graphene nanoribbon by changing graphene's effective surface plasmons wavelength. A configuration of monolayer graphene conveyor is proposed and Langevin dynamics reveals that a prototypical nanoparticle (1 nm size) can be effectively confined and transported along the device with proper external bias voltage. Hence, this work successfully proposes a promising avenue toward reconfigurable nanomanipulation of sub-1 nm nanoparticles, and goes beyond the current state-of-the-art of optical micrometer/nanometer-sized particles manipulation with optical tweezers and nanoplasmonic tweezers.