All-silica microfluidic optical stretcher with acoustophoretic prefocusing

Acoustophoresis is a widely reported and used technique for microparticle manipulation and separation. In the study described here, acustophoresis is employed to prefocus the flow (i.e., focusing occurring upstream of the analysis region) in a microfluidic chip intended for optical trapping and stretching. The whole microchip is made of silica with optical waveguides integrated by femtosecond laser writing. The acoustic force is produced by driving an external piezoelectric ceramic attached underneath the microchip at the chip resonance frequency. Thanks to an efficient excitation of acoustic waves in both water and glass, acoustophoretic focusing is observed along the channel length (>40 mm) and it is successfully demonstrated both with polystyrene beads, swollen red blood cell, and cells from mouse fibroblast cellular lines (L929). Moreover, by comparing results of cell stretching measurements, we demonstrate that acoustic waves do not alter the optical deformability of the cells and that the acoustic prefocusing results in a considerable enhancement of throughput in optical stretching experiments.