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.

Soft Matter Lab presentations at the SPIE Optics+Photonics Digital Forum

Seven members of the Soft Matter Lab (Saga HelgadottirBenjamin Midtvedt, Aykut Argun, Laura Pérez-GarciaDaniel MidtvedtHarshith BachimanchiEmiliano Gómez) were selected for oral and poster presentations at the SPIE Optics+Photonics Digital Forum, August 24-28, 2020.

The SPIE digital forum is a free, online only event.
The registration for the Digital Forum includes access to all presentations and proceedings.

The Soft Matter Lab contributions are part of the SPIE Nanoscience + Engineering conferences, namely the conference on Emerging Topics in Artificial Intelligence 2020 and the conference on Optical Trapping and Optical Micromanipulation XVII.

The contributions being presented are listed below, including also the presentations co-authored by Giovanni Volpe.

Note: the presentation times are indicated according to PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) (GMT-7)

Emerging Topics in Artificial Intelligence 2020

Saga Helgadottir
Digital video microscopy with deep learning (Invited Paper)
26 August 2020, 10:30 AM
SPIE Link: here.

Aykut Argun
Calibration of force fields using recurrent neural networks
26 August 2020, 8:30 AM
SPIE Link: here.

Laura Pérez-García
Deep-learning enhanced light-sheet microscopy
25 August 2020, 9:10 AM
SPIE Link: here.

Daniel Midtvedt
Holographic characterization of subwavelength particles enhanced by deep learning
24 August 2020, 2:40 PM
SPIE Link: here.

Benjamin Midtvedt
DeepTrack: A comprehensive deep learning framework for digital microscopy
26 August 2020, 11:40 AM
SPIE Link: here.

Gorka Muñoz-Gil
The anomalous diffusion challenge: Single trajectory characterisation as a competition
26 August 2020, 12:00 PM
SPIE Link: here.

Meera Srikrishna
Brain tissue segmentation using U-Nets in cranial CT scans
25 August 2020, 2:00 PM
SPIE Link: here.

Juan S. Sierra
Automated corneal endothelium image segmentation in the presence of cornea guttata via convolutional neural networks
26 August 2020, 11:50 AM
SPIE Link: here.

Harshith Bachimanchi
Digital holographic microscopy driven by deep learning: A study on marine planktons (Poster)
24 August 2020, 5:30 PM
SPIE Link: here.

Emiliano Gómez
BRAPH 2.0: Software for the analysis of brain connectivity with graph theory (Poster)
24 August 2020, 5:30 PM
SPIE Link: here.

Optical Trapping and Optical Micromanipulation XVII

Laura Pérez-García
Reconstructing complex force fields with optical tweezers
24 August 2020, 5:00 PM
SPIE Link: here.

Alejandro V. Arzola
Direct visualization of the spin-orbit angular momentum conversion in optical trapping
25 August 2020, 10:40 AM
SPIE Link: here.

Isaac Lenton
Illuminating the complex behaviour of particles in optical traps with machine learning
26 August 2020, 9:10 AM
SPIE Link: here.

Fatemeh Kalantarifard
Optical trapping of microparticles and yeast cells at ultra-low intensity by intracavity nonlinear feedback forces
24 August 2020, 11:10 AM
SPIE Link: here.

Note: the presentation times are indicated according to PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) (GMT-7)

Intracavity Optical Trapping published in Nature Commun.

Intracavity Optical Trapping

Intracavity optical trapping of microscopic particles in a ring-cavity fiber laser
Fatemeh Kalantarifard, Parviz Elahi, Ghaith Makey, Onofrio M. Maragò, F. Ömer Ilday & Giovanni Volpe
Nature Communications 10, 2683 (2019)
doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-10662-7
arXiv: 1808.07831

Standard optical tweezers rely on optical forces arising when a focused laser beam interacts with a microscopic particle: scattering forces, pushing the particle along the beam direction, and gradient forces, attracting it towards the high-intensity focal spot. Importantly, the incoming laser beam is not affected by the particle position because the particle is outside the laser cavity. Here, we demonstrate that intracavity nonlinear feedback forces emerge when the particle is placed inside the optical cavity, resulting in orders-of-magnitude higher confinement along the three axes per unit laser intensity on the sample. This scheme allows trapping at very low numerical apertures and reduces the laser intensity to which the particle is exposed by two orders of magnitude compared to a standard 3D optical tweezers. These results are highly relevant for many applications requiring manipulation of samples that are subject to photodamage, such as in biophysics and nanosciences.

Fatemeh Kalantarifard defended her PhD Thesis on 10 June 2019. Congrats!

Fatemeh Kalantarifard defended her PhD Thesis on 10 June 2019 in the Department of Physics Seminar Room SA-240 – Bilkent University.
Her Ph.D. Thesis Defense was live streamed on 10 June 2019 at 15:30 CEST in the Raven & Fox room.

Assoc. Prof. Ömer Ilday (UNAM, Bilkent University),  Assoc. Prof. Alpan Bek (Middle-East Technical University), Assist. Prof. Burcin Ünlü (Bogazici University), Dr. Seymour Jahangirov (UNAM), Prof. Oguz Gülseren (Bilkent University) and Assist. Prof. Giovanni Volpe (Bilkent University) will be the thesis committee members.

Thesis title: Intra-cavity optical trapping with fiber laser

Thesis abstract: Standard optical tweezers rely on optical forces arising when a focused laser beam interacts with a microscopic particle: scattering forces, pushing the particle along the beam direction, and gradient forces, attracting it towards the high-intensity focal spot. Importantly, the incoming laser beam is not affected by the particle position because the particle is outside the laser cavity. Here, we demonstrate that intra-cavity nonlinear feedback forces emerge when the particle is placed inside the optical cavity, resulting in orders-of-magnitude higher confinement along the three axes per unit laser intensity on the sample. This scheme allows trapping at very low numerical apertures and reduces the laser intensity to which the particle is exposed by two orders of magnitude compared to a standard 3D optical tweezers. These results are highly relevant for many applications requiring manipulation of samples that are subject to photodamage, such as in biophysics and nano-sciences.

Thesis Advisor  Giovanni Volpe, Department of Physics, Bilkent University

Place: Physics Department seminar room (SA240), Bilkent University
Time: 10 June, 2019, 16:30 TRT (Turkey Time)

LIVE STREAMING:
Place: Meeting room Raven & Fox, Gothenburg University
Time: 10 June, 2019, 15:30 CEST