The article titled Three-dimensional close-to-substrate trajectories of magnetic microparticles in dynamically changing magnetic field landscapes by Rico Huhnstock, Meike Reginka, Claudius Sonntag, Maximilian Merkel, Kristina Dingel, Bernhard Sick, Michael Vogel and Arno Ehresmann was published at the Springer Nature Journal Scientific Reports. IES was involved in software development and analysis. This is what the article is about:

The transport of magnetic particles (MPs) by dynamic magnetic field landscapes (MFLs) using magnetically patterned substrates is promising for the development of Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) systems. The inherent close-to-substrate MP motion is sensitive to changing particle–substrate interactions. Thus, the detection of a modified particle–substrate separation distance caused by surface binding of an analyte is expected to be a promising probe in analytics and diagnostics. Here, we present an essential prerequisite for such an application, namely the label-free quantitative experimental determination of the three-dimensional trajectories of superparamagnetic particles (SPPs) transported by a dynamically changing MFL. The evaluation of defocused SPP images from optical bright-field microscopy revealed a “hopping”-like motion of the magnetic particles, previously predicted by theory, additionally allowing a quantification of maximum jump heights. As our findings pave the way towards precise determination of particle–substrate separations, they bear deep implications for future LOC detection schemes using only optical microscopy.

You can read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00287-021-01421-4