“…In general, temperature gradients can drive various effects such as: (i) natural convection resulting from the induced density gradient [5][6][7], (ii) particle transport by thermophoresis [8,9], or (iii) thermocapillary flows in samples with fluid interfaces [10,11]. Birikh was the first to study convective flows induced by longitudinal temperature gradients [3,12] and his work has been recently extended to inclined temperature gradients [13]. However, at the micron scale, as in microfluidic applications, wellcontrolled temperature gradients may be difficult to induce by conventional techniques.…”