Precise Cell Manipulation using High Frequency Surface Acoustic Waves

Precise manipulation of particles and biological cells is an essential process in various biomedical research fields, industrial and clinical applications. Among various force fields applied for microfluidic cell manipulation, acoustic waves have superior propagating properties in solids and fluids, which can readily enable non-contact cell manipulation in long operating distances. In addition, acoustic fields are advantageous to high power laser beams for non-contact optical tweezing in terms of biocompatibility, throughput and setup simplicity. Exploiting acoustic waves for fluid and cell manipulation in microfluidics has led to a newly emerging research area, acoustofluidics. In this presentation, I will talk about particle and cell manipulation in microfluidics using high frequency surface acoustic waves (SAW). In particular, I will discuss a unique design of a focused IDT (FIDT) structure, which is able to generate a highly localized SAW field on the order of 20 µm wide. This highly focused acoustic beam has an effective manipulation area size that is comparable to individual micron-sized particles. Here, I demonstrate the use of this highly localized SAW field for single cell level sorting using sub-millisecond pulses and selective capture of cells.