Seminar by B. Roy, 24 May 2023

Basudev Roy.
Study of out-of-plane rotations in optical tweezers and applications in soft matter and biological systems
Basudev Roy
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India
Date: 24 May 2023
Time: 12:30
Place: Nexus

Abstract:
A rigid body can have 6 degrees of freedom, namely the three translational degrees of freedom and the three rotational degrees of freedom. Of these, the translational degrees have been well explored in optical tweezers community. However, only the in-plane rotational degree of freedom has been explored. We call this in-plane degree of rotational freedom, the yaw motion in the nomenclature of the airlines. The pitch and roll degrees are only beginning to be explored recently.

In this talk, I will show you 4 ways of generating pitch rotation using the optical tweezers. I will also show you one way of detection of pitch rotation at high resolution using birefringent particles. Further, I will discuss some applications of this pitch rotation in soft matter systems and biology. I will also show you a few other projects that we are working on inside the lab.

Bio:
Basudev Roy got his MSc from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and MS from the University of Maryland, College Park. He got his PhD from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata in 2015. He was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the University of Tuebingen, Germany for his postdoctoral research from 2015 to 2017. He joined Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India since 2017 where he is now an Associate Professor.

Roadmap for Optical Tweezers published in Journal of Physics: Photonics

Illustration of an optical tweezers holding a particle. (Image by A. Magazzù.)
Roadmap for optical tweezers
Giovanni Volpe, Onofrio M Maragò, Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop, Giuseppe Pesce, Alexander B Stilgoe, Giorgio Volpe, Georgiy Tkachenko, Viet Giang Truong, Síle Nic Chormaic, Fatemeh Kalantarifard, Parviz Elahi, Mikael Käll, Agnese Callegari, Manuel I Marqués, Antonio A R Neves, Wendel L Moreira, Adriana Fontes, Carlos L Cesar, Rosalba Saija, Abir Saidi, Paul Beck, Jörg S Eismann, Peter Banzer, Thales F D Fernandes, Francesco Pedaci, Warwick P Bowen, Rahul Vaippully, Muruga Lokesh, Basudev Roy, Gregor Thalhammer-Thurner, Monika Ritsch-Marte, Laura Pérez García, Alejandro V Arzola, Isaac Pérez Castillo, Aykut Argun, Till M Muenker, Bart E Vos, Timo Betz, Ilaria Cristiani, Paolo Minzioni, Peter J Reece, Fan Wang, David McGloin, Justus C Ndukaife, Romain Quidant, Reece P Roberts, Cyril Laplane, Thomas Volz, Reuven Gordon, Dag Hanstorp, Javier Tello Marmolejo, Graham D Bruce, Kishan Dholakia, Tongcang Li, Oto Brzobohatý, Stephen H Simpson, Pavel Zemánek, Felix Ritort, Yael Roichman, Valeriia Bobkova, Raphael Wittkowski, Cornelia Denz, G V Pavan Kumar, Antonino Foti, Maria Grazia Donato, Pietro G Gucciardi, Lucia Gardini, Giulio Bianchi, Anatolii V Kashchuk, Marco Capitanio, Lynn Paterson, Philip H Jones, Kirstine Berg-Sørensen, Younes F Barooji, Lene B Oddershede, Pegah Pouladian, Daryl Preece, Caroline Beck Adiels, Anna Chiara De Luca, Alessandro Magazzù, David Bronte Ciriza, Maria Antonia Iatì, Grover A Swartzlander Jr
Journal of Physics: Photonics 2(2), 022501 (2023)
arXiv: 2206.13789
doi: 110.1088/2515-7647/acb57b

Optical tweezers are tools made of light that enable contactless pushing, trapping, and manipulation of objects, ranging from atoms to space light sails. Since the pioneering work by Arthur Ashkin in the 1970s, optical tweezers have evolved into sophisticated instruments and have been employed in a broad range of applications in the life sciences, physics, and engineering. These include accurate force and torque measurement at the femtonewton level, microrheology of complex fluids, single micro- and nano-particle spectroscopy, single-cell analysis, and statistical-physics experiments. This roadmap provides insights into current investigations involving optical forces and optical tweezers from their theoretical foundations to designs and setups. It also offers perspectives for applications to a wide range of research fields, from biophysics to space exploration.