Photo‐Gated Corona Microfluidics
Xiaxia Cui, Yiqing Liu, Xinyi Qiu, Manfei Liu, Biao Cheng, Yuan Zhou, Changguo Xue, Sheng Zhang, Xin Tang, Qiang Tang · 2026
Read Photo‐Gated Corona Microfluidics by Xiaxia Cui, Yiqing Liu, Xinyi Qiu, Manfei Liu, Biao Cheng, Yuan Zhou, Changguo Xue, Sheng Zhang, Xin Tang, Qiang Tang (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13423506.txt.
Description
Cui and co-authors unveil a light-controlled platform for moving tiny objects around on an open surface, in this 2026 study. The surface has no patterned electrodes. A near-infrared laser melts a paraffin layer at one spot. That flips local charge transport from sluggish diffusion to flowing convection. It also builds a sharp electric-field gradient. The gradient grabs charged droplets through corona discharge. That is the same effect that makes high-voltage wires crackle.
A single steerable beam transported droplets, solid particles, and gas bubbles, and performed the full microfluidic repertoire: moving, merging, splitting, dispensing, and steering reactions. The surface kept working tilted, vertical, upside down, and curved, and handled volumes spanning roughly ten orders of magnitude, from picoliters to milliliters, including corrosive liquids and biological samples. The authors pitch the design as a simple, unified route to programmable lab-on-a-chip systems.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Xiaxia Cui, Yiqing Liu, Xinyi Qiu, Manfei Liu, Biao Cheng, Yuan Zhou, Changguo Xue, Sheng Zhang, Xin Tang, Qiang Tang |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 40 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |