Abstract
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.