Related papers: Tutorial on the analytical calculation of optical …
Since its invention by Arthur Ashkin and colleagues at Bell Labs in the 1970s, optical micromanipulation, also known as optical tweezers or laser tweezers, has evolved remarkably to become one of the most convenient and versatile tools for…
Optical tweezers are tools made of light that enable contactless pushing, trapping, and manipulation of objects ranging from atoms to space light sails. Since the pioneering work by Arthur Ashkin in the 1970s, optical tweezers have evolved…
On 2 October 2018 Goran Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics would be jointly awarded to Arthur Ashkin, Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland, for their groundbreaking…
Optical tweezers are highly versatile laser traps for neutral microparticles, with fundamental applications in physics and in single molecule cell biology. Force measurements are performed by converting the stiffness response to…
Optical tweezers have found widespread application in many fields, from physics to biology. Here, we explain in detail how optical forces and torques can be described within the geometrical optics approximation and we show that this…
Since their invention in 1986 by Arthur Ashkin and colleagues, optical tweezers have become an essential tool in several fields of physics, spectroscopy, biology, nanotechnology, and thermodynamics. In this Tutorial, we provide a primer on…
Optical trapping, where microscopic particles are trapped and manipulated by light is a powerful and widespread technique, with the single-beam gradient trap (also known as optical tweezers) in use for a large number of biological and other…
Since their invention in the 1980s [1], optical tweezers have found a wide range of applications, from biophotonics and mechanobiology to microscopy and optomechanics [2, 3, 4, 5]. Simulations of the motion of microscopic particles held by…
Computational modelling has made many useful contributions to the field of optical tweezers. One aspect in which it can be applied is the simulation of the dynamics of particles in optical tweezers. This can be useful for systems with many…
Optical tweezers are powerful tools based on focused laser beams. They are able to trap, manipulate and investigate a wide range of microscopic and nanoscopic particles in different media, such as liquids, air, and vacuum. Key applications…
We show that the optical force field in optical tweezers with elliptically polarized beams has the opposite handedness for a wide range of particle sizes and for the most common configurations. Our method is based on the direct observation…
Optical tweezers is a very well-established technique that has developed into a standard tool for trapping and manipulating micron and submicron particles with great success in the last decades. Although the nature of light enforces…
Since the pioneering work of Arthur Ashkin, optical tweezers have become an indispensable tool for contactless manipulation of micro- and nanoparticles. Nowadays optical tweezers are employed in a myriad of applications demonstrating the…
Optical tweezers enable non-contact trapping of micro-scale objects using light. Despite their widespread use, it is currently not known how tightly it is possible to three-dimensionally trap micro-particles with a given photon budget.…
Optical tweezers are a technique in which microscopic-sized particles, including living cells and bacteria, can be non-intrusively trapped with high accuracy solely using focused light. The technique has therefore become a powerful tool in…
We report for the first time the theory of optical tweezers of spherical dielectric particles embedded in a chiral medium. We develop a partial-wave (Mie) expansion to calculate the optical force acting on a dielectric microsphere…
Reflection and refraction of light can be used to trap small dielectric particles in the geometrical optics regime. Absorption of light is usually neglected in theoretical calculations, but it is known that it occurs in the optical trapping…
Optical tweezers are widely used as a highly sensitive tool to measure forces on micron-scale particles. One such application is the measurement of the electric charge of a particle, which can be done with high precision in liquids, air, or…
Optically levitated dielectric nanoparticles have become valuable tools for precision sensing and quantum optomechanical experiments. To predict the dynamic properties of a particle trapped in an optical tweezer with high fidelity, a tool…
We propose to use optical tweezers to probe the Casimir interaction between microspheres inside a liquid medium for geometric aspect ratios far beyond the validity of the widely employed proximity force approximation. This setup has the…