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We have quantified the photomovement behavior of a suspension of Euglena gracilis representing a behavioral response to a light gradient. Despite recent measurements of phototaxis and photophobicity, the details of macroscopic behavior of cell photomovements under conditions of light intensity gradients, which are critical to understand recent experiments on spatially localized bioconvection patterns, have not been fully understood. In this paper, the flux of cell number density under a light intensity gradient was measured by the following two experiments. In the first experiment, a capillary containing the cell suspension was illuminated with different light intensities in two regions. In the steady state, the differences of the cell numbers in the two regions normalized by the total number were proportional to the light difference, where the light intensity difference ranged from 0.5–2.0 μmol m−2 s−1. The proportional coefficient was positive (i.e., the bright region contained many microorganisms) when the mean light intensity was weak (1.25 μmol m−2 s−1), whereas it was negative when the mean intensity was strong (13.75 μmol m−2 s−1). In the second experiment, a shallow rectangular container of the suspension was illuminated with stepwise light intensities. The cell number density distribution exhibited a single peak at the position where the light intensity was about Ic ≃ 3.8 μmol m−2 s−1. These results suggest that the suspension of E. gracilis responded to the light gradient and that the favorable light intensity was Ic.

This study proposes a high-speed phase-shifting interferometer with an original optical prism. This phase-shifting interferometer consists of a polarizing Mach-Zehnder interferometer, an original optical prism, a high-speed camera, and an image-processing unit for a three-step phase-shifting technique. The key aspect of the application of the phase-shifting technique to high-speed experiments is an original prism, which is designed and developed specifically for a high-speed phase-shifting technique. The arbaa prism splits an incident beam into four output beams with different information. The interferometer was applied for quantitative visualization of transient heat transfer. In order to test the optical system for measuring high-speed phenomena, the temperature during heat conduction was measured around a heated thin tungsten wire (diameter of 5 μm) in water. The visualization area is approximately 90  μm×210  μm, and the spatial resolution is 3.5 μm at 300,000 fps of the maximum temporal resolution with a high-speed camera. The temperature fields around the heated wire were determined by converting phase-shifted data using the inverse Abel transform. Finally, the measured temperature distribution was compared with numerical calculations to validate the proposed system; a good agreement was obtained.