Sorting of mesoporous silica derivatives by random optical fields

Mesoporous silica particles are promising candidates for drug delivery applications. In this paper, we first synthesize mesoporous silica MCM-41 and its derivative MCM-41GA with anchored glutaraldehyde bridges, and characterize them using a variety of techniques.  Then, we employ random optical fields to sort them.  Random optical fields by containing local intensity gradients throughout a wide range of field of view provide an elegant, easy-to-implement, and low-cost variant of multiple optical tweezers, known as speckle tweezers (ST). Mesoporous silica variations interact differently with the applied ST, which we attribute to the pre-applied modification and the differences in the porosity structure and distribution.