Optical tug-of-war tweezers: shaping light for dynamic control of bacterial cells (Invited Paper)

Abstract

We design and demonstrate new types of optical tweezers with lateral pulling forces that allow full control of biological samples with complex geometric shapes. With appropriate beam shaping, the dual tug-of-war tweezers effectively hold and stretch elongated biological objects of different sizes, and the triangular tug-of-war tweezers with threefold rotational symmetry steadily hold asymmetric objects in the plane of observation and exert stretching forces along three directions. We successfully apply these tweezers to manipulate microparticles and bacterial cells in aqueous media.

Tunable Excitation Polarized Upconversion Luminescence and Reconfigurable Double Anti‐Counterfeiting from Er3+ Doped Single Nanorods

“…Due to its large lateral pulling forces and stability on a trapped nanorod, the TOW optical tweezer can manipulate nanorods in real-time via a LABVIEWassisted spatial light modulator (Spatial light modulator is encoded by a dynamical hologram, as described in refs. [43][44][45]). It is worth noting that, at the beginning, the space between the two arms of the TOW optical tweezer is zero, and nanorods are vertically captured by a single Gaussian beam (Figure 6b; Figure S19d, Supporting Information).…”

Rotation and oscillation of gap vortex solitons in optically induced square photonic lattices with a self-focusing nonlinearity

“…Optical vortices are intriguing objects that have a toroidshaped intensity profile with phase varying in a nontrivial screw-type manner along the propagation direction. They have been widely investigated for potential applications in areas ranging from optical tweezers [1,2], optical micromanipulation [3][4][5], data storage and quantum information processing [6,7]. In nonlinear optics, the optical vortex is stable and can self-trap into a dark vortex soliton in self-defocusing nonlinear continuum materials.…”