Hydrodynamic thermal confinement: creating thermo-chemical microenvironments on surfaces.

We present a new, general concept termed Hydrodynamic Thermal Confinement (HTC), and its implementation for the creation of microscale dynamic thermo-chemical microenvironments on biological surfaces. HTC is based on a scanning probe and operates under physiological conditions. The temperature can be regulated between 30° and 80 °C with ±0.2 °C precision and temperature ramps of 5 °C s over a footprint of ∼50 μm × 80 μm in a volume of ∼50 × 80 × 15 μm (∼50 pl).