Measuring the dynamics of colloids interacting with critical Casimir interaction via blinking optical tweezers: graphical representation of the optical traps.
Optical trapping and critical Casimir forces
Agnese Callegari, Alessandro Magazzù, Andrea Gambassi & Giovanni Volpe
The European Physical Journal Plus (EPJP), 136, 213 (2021)
doi: 10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-01020-4
arXiv: 2008.01537
Critical Casimir forces emerge between objects, such as colloidal particles, whenever their surfaces spatially confine the fluctuations of the order parameter of a critical liquid used as a solvent. These forces act at short but microscopically large distances between these objects, reaching often hundreds of nanometers. Keeping colloids at such distances is a major experimental challenge, which can be addressed by the means of optical tweezers. Here, we review how optical tweezers have been successfully used to quantitatively study critical Casimir forces acting on particles in suspensions. As we will see, the use of optical tweezers to experimentally study critical Casimir forces can play a crucial role in developing nano-technologies, representing an innovative way to realize self-assembled devices at the nano- and microscale.
Nils Jacobson defended his Master thesis in MPCAS at the Chalmers University of Technology on 16 February 2021. Congrats!
Screenshot of Nils Jacobson’s Master Thesis defence.Title: Vascular Bifurcation Detection in Cerebral CT Angiography Using CNN and Frangi Filters
Segmentation and feature extraction are important tools for analysing and visualizing information in medical image data, particularly in vascular image data which relates to widely spread vascular diseases. Vessel segmentation is extensively featured in research, recently adapting trends in deep learning image processing. This paper aims to develop a vessel bifurcation detection method to support a seed point based segmentation approach. The suggested approach is a combination of classification, with a convolutional neural network (DenseNet), local vessel segmentation, with Frangi filters, and 3D morphological skeletonization. A small data set is produced for network training and evaluation. Results indicate a high classification accuracy which filters problematic samples for the Frangi filter. Thus the combination is able to suggest quality branch seed points under most circumstances. Next step would be to expand the data set to enable further optimization and more rigid evaluation. In any case a combination of a high performance classifier followed by qualitative assessment of local samples show potential.
Name of the master programme: MPCAS – Complex Adaptive Systems Supervisor: Jonna Hellström and Giovanni Volpe Examiner: Giovanni Volpe, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg Opponent: Eva Škvor
Place: Online via Zoom Time: 16 February, 2021, 16:00
Schematic of the experiment with a suspended metallic flake-like particle on a gold-coated substrate.QED Casimir vs Critical Casimir Forces: Trapping and Releasing of metal flake particles
Falko Schmidt, Agnese Callegari, Giovanni Volpe
(online at) MPI Stuttgart, Germany
11 February 2021, 14:30-16.00
We propose a mechanism for restoration of collapsed structures using critical Casimir forces by investigating the diffusion of metal flake-like particles. By tuning temperature near-criticality and employing selective self-assembled monolayers the resulting repulsive critical Casimir force is large enough to lift off particle and enable transitions previously impeded by QED Casimir attraction.
Intercellular communication induces glycolytic synchronization waves between individually oscillating cells
Intercellular communication induces glycolytic synchronization waves between individually oscillating cells Martin Mojica-Benavides, David D. van Niekerk, Mite Mijalkov, Jacky L. Snoep, Bernhard Mehlig, Giovanni Volpe, Caroline B. Adiels & Mattias Goksör
PNAS 118(6), e2010075118 (2021)
doi: 10.1073/pnas.2010075118
arXiv: 1909.05187
Metabolic oscillations in single cells underlie the mechanisms behind cell synchronization and cell-cell communication. For example, glycolytic oscillations mediated by biochemical communication between cells may synchronize the pulsatile insulin secretion by pancreatic tissue, and a link between glycolytic synchronization anomalies and type-2 diabetes has been hypotesized. Cultures of yeast cells have provided an ideal model system to study synchronization and propagation waves of glycolytic oscillations in large populations. However, the mechanism by which synchronization occurs at individual cell-cell level and overcome local chemical concentrations and heterogenic biological clocks, is still an open question because of experimental limitations in sensitive and specific handling of single cells. Here, we show how the coupling of intercellular diffusion with the phase regulation of individual oscillating cells induce glycolytic synchronization waves. We directly measure the single-cell metabolic responses from yeast cells in a microfluidic environment and characterize a discretized cell-cell communication using graph theory. We corroborate our findings with simulations based on a kinetic detailed model for individual yeast cells. These findings can provide insight into the roles cellular synchronization play in biomedical applications, such as insulin secretion regulation at the cellular level.
Giovanni Volpe is part of the committee of the conference Optical Manipulation and its Applications (OMA), which is part of the OSA Biophotonics Congress: Optics in the Life Sciences.
Optical Manipulation encompasses all areas of manipulation and measurement using light, from optical manipulation of microparticles to photoactivated materials and optogenetics, emphasizing new and developing application areas in biophysics and biomedicine.
The categories of topics in the conference are Optical Manipulation in Biophysics and Biomedicine, Optical Manipulation Fundamentals, Optical Manipulation Applications, and Alternative Manipulation Techniques.
The conference will be held online 12-16 April 2021.
Deep learning for microscopy and optical trapping
Giovanni Volpe
21 January 2021, 16:30 CEST
Online
Invited seminar for Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, India
After a brief overview of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning, I will present a series of recent works in which we have employed deep learning for applications in photonics and active matter. In particular, I will explain how we employed deep learning to enhance digital video microscopy, to estimate the properties of anomalous diffusion, to characterize microscopic force fields, to improve the calculation of optical forces, and to characterize nanoparticles. Finally, I will provide an outlook for the application of deep learning in photonics and active matter.
Falko Schmidt defended his PhD Thesis in Physics on Friday, 15 January 2021. Congrats!
The disputation took place at 9 a.m., in PJ salen, Fysikgården.
Falko Schmidt’s opponent, Peer Fischer, gave an introductory presentation with title “Microswimmers and motile active matter”.
From Falko Schmidt’s PhD Thesis.Title: Active Matter in a Critical State: From passive building blocks to active molecules, engines and droplets
The motion of microscopic objects is strongly affected by their surrounding environment. In quiescent liquids, motion is reduced to random fluctuations known as Brownian motion. Nevertheless, microorganisms have been able to develop mechanisms to generate active motion. This has inspired researchers to understand and artificially replicate active motion. Now, the field of active matter has developed into a multi-disciplinary field, with researchers developing artificial microswimmers, producing miniaturized versions of heat engines and showing that individual colloids self-assemble into larger microstructures. This thesis taps into the development of artificial microscopic and nanoscopic systems and demonstrates that passive building blocks such as colloids are transformed into active molecules, engines and active droplets that display a rich set of motions. This is achieved by combining optical manipulation with a phase-separating environment consisting of a critical binary mixture. I first show how simple absorbing particles are transformed into fast rotating microengines using optical tweezers, and how this principle can be scaled down to nanoscopic particles. Transitioning then from single particles to self-assembled modular swimmers, such colloidal molecules exhibit diverse behaviour such as propulsion, orbital rotation and spinning, and whose formation process I can control with periodic illumination. To characterize the molecules dynamics better, I introduce a machine-learning algorithm to determine the anomalous exponent of trajectories and to identify changes in a trajectory’s behaviour. Towards understanding the behaviour of larger microstructures, I then investigate the interaction of colloidal molecules with their phase-separating environment and observe a two-fold coupling between the induced liquid droplets and their immersed colloids. With the help of simulations I gain a better physical picture and can further analyse the molecules’ and droplets’ emergence and growth dynamics. At last, I show that fluctuation-induced forces can solve current limitations in microfabrication due to stiction, enabling a further development of the field towards smaller and more stable nanostructures required for nowadays adaptive functional materials. The insights gained from this research mark the path towards a new generation of design principles, e.g., for the construction of flexible micromotors, tunable micromembranes and drug delivery in health care applications.
Phase and amplitude signals from representative particles for testing the performance of the Deep-learning approach
Fast and Accurate Nanoparticle Characterization Using Deep-Learning-Enhanced Off-Axis Holography
Benjamin Midtvedt, Erik Olsén, Fredrik Eklund, Fredrik Höök, Caroline Beck Adiels, Giovanni Volpe, Daniel Midtvedt
ACS Nano 15(2), 2240–2250 (2021)
doi: 10.1021/acsnano.0c06902
arXiv: 2006.11154
The characterisation of the physical properties of nanoparticles in their native environment plays a central role in a wide range of fields, from nanoparticle-enhanced drug delivery to environmental nanopollution assessment. Standard optical approaches require long trajectories of nanoparticles dispersed in a medium with known viscosity to characterise their diffusion constant and, thus, their size. However, often only short trajectories are available, while the medium viscosity is unknown, e.g., in most biomedical applications. In this work, we demonstrate a label-free method to quantify size and refractive index of individual subwavelength particles using two orders of magnitude shorter trajectories than required by standard methods, and without assumptions about the physicochemical properties of the medium. We achieve this by developing a weighted average convolutional neural network to analyse the holographic images of the particles. As a proof of principle, we distinguish and quantify size and refractive index of silica and polystyrene particles without prior knowledge of solute viscosity or refractive index. As an example of an application beyond the state of the art, we demonstrate how this technique can monitor the aggregation of polystyrene nanoparticles, revealing the time-resolved dynamics of the monomer number and fractal dimension of individual subwavelength aggregates. This technique opens new possibilities for nanoparticle characterisation with a broad range of applications from biomedicine to environmental monitoring.
