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Light-induced actuating nanotransducers
Edited by Vinothan N. Manoharan, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and accepted by the Editorial Board March 30, 2016 (received for review December 9, 2015)

Significance
Scientists have dreamt of nanomachines that can navigate in water, sense their environment, communicate, and respond. Various power sources and propulsion systems have been proposed but they lack speed, strength, and control. We introduce here a previously undefined paradigm for nanoactuation which is incredibly simple, but solves many problems. It is optically powered (although other modes are also possible), and potentially offers unusually large force/mass. This looks to be widely generalizable, because the actuating nanotransducers can be selectively bound to designated active sites. The concept can underpin a plethora of future designs and already we produce a dramatic optical response over large areas at high speed.
Abstract
Nanoactuators and nanomachines have long been sought after, but key bottlenecks remain. Forces at submicrometer scales are weak and slow, control is hard to achieve, and power cannot be reliably supplied. Despite the increasing complexity of nanodevices such as DNA origami and molecular machines, rapid mechanical operations are not yet possible. Here, we bind temperature-responsive polymers to charged Au nanoparticles, storing elastic energy that can be rapidly released under light control for repeatable isotropic nanoactuation. Optically heating above a critical temperature
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: dt413{at}cam.ac.uk or jjb12{at}cam.ac.uk.
Author contributions: T.D., V.K.V., and J.J.B. designed research; T.D., V.K.V., and A.R.S. performed research; A.R.S., C.J.F., S.K.S., and O.A.S. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; T.D., V.K.V., D.F., and J.J.B. analyzed data; and T.D., V.K.V., O.A.S., D.F., and J.J.B. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. V.N.M. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
Data deposition: The raw data of the figures in this paper can be found at https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/254762.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1524209113/-/DCSupplemental.