A Step-by-step Guide to the Realisation of Advanced Optical Tweezers

Abstract

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 importance of these tools. While the basic principle of optical tweezers is the use of a strongly focused laser beam to trap and manipulate particles, ever more complex experimental set-ups are required in order to perform novel and challenging experiments. With this article, we provide a detailed step- by-step guide for the construction of advanced optical manipulation systems. First, we explain how to build a single-beam optical tweezers on a home-made microscope and how to calibrate it. Improving on this design, we realize a holographic optical tweezers, which can manipulate independently multiple particles and generate more sophisticated wavefronts such as Laguerre-Gaussian beams. Finally, we explain how to implement a speckle optical tweezers, which permit one to employ random speckle light fields for deterministic optical manipulation.

29 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Optical microrheology using rotating laser-trapped particles
• Work and heat probability distribution of an optically driven Brownian particle: Theory and experiments
• Speckle Optical Tweezers: Micromanipulation with Random Light Fields
• Longterm Influence of Inertia on the Diffusion of a Brownian Particle

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments
• High-Performance Reconstruction of Microscopic Force Fields from Brownian Trajectories
• Active Brownian and inertial particles in disordered environments: short-time expansion of the mean-square displacement
• How light absorption modifies the radiative force on a microparticle in optical tweezers
• OTSLM Toolbox for Structured Light Methods
• Optical Tweezers: A Comprehensive Tutorial from Calibration to Applications