Fundamental constraints on particle tracking with optical tweezers

Abstract

A general quantum limit to the sensitivity of particle position measurements is derived following the simple principle of the Heisenberg microscope. The value of this limit is calculated for particles in the Rayleigh and Mie scattering regimes, and with parameters which are relevant to optical tweezers experiments. The minimum power required to observe the zero-point motion of a levitating bead is also calculated, with the optimal particle diameter always smaller than the wavelength. We show that recent optical tweezers experiments are within two orders of magnitude of quantum limited sensitivity, suggesting that quantum optical resources may soon play an important role in high sensitivity tracking applications.

References in corpus (5)

• Experimental realization of sub-shot-noise quantum imaging
• Cooling a nanomechanical resonator with quantum back-action
• Millikelvin cooling of an optically trapped microsphere in vacuum
• Balanced Homodyne Detection of Optical Quantum States at Audio-Band Frequencies and Below
• Development of a Fast Position-Sensitive Laser Beam Detector

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Subdiffraction-limited quantum imaging within a living cell
• Sensitivity, quantum limits, and quantum enhancement of noise spectroscopies
• A computational tool to characterize particle tracking measurements in optical tweezers
• Optical lock-in particle tracking in optical tweezers
• Quantum enhanced estimation of diffusion