Related papers: Cell selective manipulation with single beam acous…
We explain and demonstrate a new method of force- and position-calibration for optical tweezers with back-focal-plane photo detection. The method combines power spectral measurements of thermal motion and the response to a sinusoidal motion…
Light and sound waves have the fascinating property that they can move objects through the transfer of linear or angular momentum. This ability has led to the development of optical and acoustic tweezers, with applications ranging from…
Red blood cells possess unique biomechanical ability to squeeze through capillaries smaller than their size to enable gas and ion exchange. A key signature of their active biomechanics is the out-of-equilibrium fluctuation of the plasma…
The manipulation of microparticles using optical forces has led to many applications in the life and physical sciences. To extend optical trapping towards the nano-regime, in this work we demonstrate trapping of single nanoparticles in…
We combine optical tweezers with feedback to impose arbitrary potentials on a colloidal particle. The feedback trap detects a particle's position, calculates a force based on an imposed "virtual potential," and shifts the trap center to…
Solid-state nanopores offer a powerful platform for nanoscale analysis of individual analytes, including biomolecules and functionalized nanoparticles, by confining them within a precisely defined sensing region. However, their inherently…
Noncontact particle manipulation (NPM) technology has significantly extended mankind's analysis capability into micro and nano scale, which in turn greatly promoted the development of material science and life science. Though NPM by means…
Optical tweezers have become essential tools to manipulate atoms or molecules at a single particle level. However, using standard diffracted-limited optical systems, the transverse size of the trap is lower bounded by the optical…
Contemporary approaches to optical multiple micro-manipulation typically involve careful pre-engineering of the laser beam shape. In various biomedical and microfluidic scenarios, especially those necessitating unconventional specimen…
Acoustic traps are used to capture and handle suspended microparticles and cells in microfluidic applications. A particular simple and much-used acoustic trap consists of a commercially available, millimeter-sized, liquid-filled glass…
A nanofiber-based optical tweezer is demonstrated. Trapping is achieved by combining attractive near-field optical gradient forces with repulsive electrostatic forces. Silica-coated Fe$_2$O$_3$ nanospheres of 300 diameter are trapped as…
High-precision micromanipulation techniques, including optical tweezers and hydrodynamic trapping, have garnered wide-spread interest. Recent advances in optofluidic multiplexed assembly and microrobotics demonstrate significant progress,…
Optical tweezers find applications in various fields, ranging from biology to physics. One of the fundamental steps necessary to perform quantitative measurements using trapped particles is the calibration of the tweezer's spring constant.…
Red blood cells (RBCs) sustain mechanical stresses associated with microcirculatory flow through ATP-driven plasma membrane flickering. This is an active phenomenon driven by motor proteins that regulate interactions between the spectrin…
Optical manipulation has attracted remarkable interest owing to its versatile and non-invasive nature. However, conventional optical trapping remains inefficient for the nanoscopic world. The emergence of plasmonics in recent years has…
Resistive Pulse Sensing (RPS) is a key label-free technology to measure particles and single-cell size distribution. As a growing corpus of evidence supports that cancer cells exhibit distinct mechanical phenotypes from healthy cells,…
Optical tweezers exploit light--matter interactions to trap particles ranging from single atoms to micrometer-sized eukaryotic cells. For this reason, optical tweezers are a ubiquitous tool in physics, biology, and nanotechnology. Recently,…
Although general purpose robotic manipulators are becoming more capable at manipulating various objects, their ability to manipulate millimeter-scale objects are usually very limited. On the other hand, ultrasonic levitation devices have…
A common limitation of autonomous tissue manipulation in robotic minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is the absence of force sensing and control at the tool level. Recently, our team has developed miniature force-sensing forceps that can…
Near-field patterns of light provide a way to optically trap, deliver and sort single nanoscopic particles in a wide variety of applications in nanophotonics, microbiology and nanotechnology. Using rigorous electromagnetic theory, we…