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.

Presentation by G. V. P. Kumar, 24 November 2021

Thermoplasmonic Tweezers: Probing single-molecules and more
G. V. Pavan Kumar
IISER, Pune, India.
24 November 2021
Online

In this presentation, we will discuss two specific issues: How to perform single-molecule surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) in an optothermal trap? and how to design optothermal fields to trap and interrogate molecules and colloids in a fluid?

In recent years, performing SERS in optical traps has emerged as an important development in nano- and bio-photonics. To this end, tweezer techniques based on surface-plasmons facilitate deeper optical potentials at sub-wavelength scales, and simultaneously provide enhanced electric and optothermal fields. In this
presentation, we will discuss various strategies developed in my laboratory to perform single-molecule SERS in optical and plasmonic tweezer platforms. Specifically, we will highlight some thermoplasmonic effects and directionality aspects of the tweezer platforms in metallic thin film and some plasmonic nano-architectures.

Short bio:

G.V. Pavan Kumar is an associate professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, India.
He obtained his PhD from JNCASR, Bangalore. Subsequently he was a postdoctoral fellow at ICFO-Barcelona and Purdue University, before joining IISER in 2010.
His current research interests are optical, optothermal and nanophotonic forces and their utility in probing single molecules and soft-matter systems at micro and nanoscale.
To this end, his lab has been interfacing optical tweezer platforms with a variety of optical spectroscopy and microscopy tools.
He blogs on topics related to science: https://backscattering.wordpress.com/