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Microfabrication is required to process glass materials in order to locally assign the desired optical properties. The authors have proposed a new microfabrication technique to form a metal sphere and manipulate the sphere inside glass. When a continuous-wave (CW) laser was illuminated from the glass side to a metal attached to the glass, a metal sphere was formed. The metal sphere was moved towards a light source with laser illumination in the glass. When the sphere migrates, it is accompanied by the diffusion of submicron metal particles. Hence, this technique allows the creation of doped regions of fine particles in the shape of a sphere’s trajectory. Controlling the shape of the particle-doped area to transform into arbitrary shapes enables the design of more flexible optical devices. The Soret effect could be one of the keys to satisfying these requirements. The Soret effect is a material transport phenomenon driven by temperature gradients in multiple components. However, to the best of our knowledge, there have been no studies on the Soret effect on metal particles in glass. Herein, we show that iron particles are transported inside silica glass as a result of temperature gradient. Metal-sphere migration produces a local particle-doped area in the glass. A temperature gradient was formed by laser heating the sphere under conditions that prevented it from moving. In situ observations revealed that particles migrated toward the metal sphere at a maximum speed of 0.56 μm/s.
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