Step-by-step guide to the realization of advanced optical tweezers

Giuseppe Pesce, Giorgio Volpe, Onofrio M. Maragó, Philip H. Jones, Sylvain Gigan, Antonio Sasso, Giovanni Volpe
2015 Journal of the Optical Society of America. B, Optical physics  
Since the pioneering work of Arthur Ashkin, optical tweezers (OT) have become an indispensable tool for contactless manipulation of micro-and nanoparticles. Nowadays OT are employed in a myriad of applications demonstrating their importance. While the basic principle of OT is the use of a strongly focused laser beam to trap and manipulate particles, more complex experimental setups are required to perform novel and challenging experiments. With this article, we provide a detailed step-by-step
more » ... ide for the construction of advanced optical manipulation systems. First, we explain how to build a single-beam OT on a homemade microscope and how to calibrate it. Improving on this design, we realize a holographic OT, which can manipulate independently multiple particles and generate more sophisticated wavefronts such as Laguerre-Gaussian beams. Finally, we explain how to implement a speckle OT, which permits one to employ random speckle light fields for deterministic optical manipulation.
doi:10.1364/josab.32.000b84 fatcat:oqbc4qjq6fcx3j4thdouwgdvnm