Optical tweezers affected by monochromatic aberrations

Abstract

Standard optical tweezers are often built as inverted microscopes consisting of reflective, diffractive or refractive optical components. These optical elements are used to adapt the laser beam size, shape the beam profile and finally to generate the optical trap. Each optical component potentially suffers from various aberrations. In this contribution we investigate the effect of aberrations on the trapping performance.

High-Bandwidth 3-D Multitrap Actuation Technique for 6-DoF Real-Time Control of Optical Robots

“…The location of the trap is determined by the angle of incidence and the degree of collimation of the laser beam and its stability is very dependent on the quality of the beam that reaches the entrance of the microscope objective. However, given the correlation between the beam that reaches the objective and the focal point, it is difficult to change the 3D position of the trap without distorting its shape and introducing aberrations that will degrade its performance [38].…”

Numerical Analysis of Optical Trapping Force Affected by Lens Misalignments

“…This idea has been used by Ashkin to explain the trapping forces on a dielectric sphere [21], and the related computational toolbox for optical tweezers in geometrical optics has also been developed [22]. However, the actual lens has aberrations, and the aberrations will have a significant impact on the optical trapping force [23,24]. Therefore, there is still room for further improvement of the ray optics method for analyzing the actual trapping force.…”