Pliers smaller than an ant’s jaws are controlled by optical fibres

By Donna Lu

Łukasz Zinkiewicz, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw

Minuscule pliers made of soppy filaments added to the ends of optical fibres would possibly well well also be controlled with visible light, and will be used to grip objects tens of micrometres in size, a lot like some particular individual cells.

Piotr Wasylczyk at the University of Warsaw in Poland and his colleagues made the pliers from liquid-crystal elastomer, a comfy polymer subject matter. They bend when visible light shines by means of connected optical fibres.

The texture of the pliers is equivalent to a extremely snug rubber, …