3D pitch rotation of microparticles and cells assumes importance in a wide variety of applications in biology, physics, chemistry and medicine. Applications such as cell imaging and injection benefit from pitch-rotational manipulation. Generation of such motion in single beam optical tweezers has remained elusive due to complicacies of generating high enough ellipticity perpendicular to the direction of propagation. Further, trapping an extended object at two locations can only generate partial pitch motion by moving one of the foci in the axial direction. Here, we use hexagonal-shaped upconverting particles and single cells trapped close to a goldcoated glass cover slip in a sample chamber to generate complete 360 degree and continuous pitch motion even with a single optical tweezers beam. The tweezers beam passing through the gold surface is partially absorbed and generates a hot-spot to produce circulatory convective flows in the vicinity which rotates the objects. The rotation rate can be controlled by the intensity of the laser light and the thickness of the gold layer. Thus such a simple configuration can turn the particle in the pitch sense. The circulatory flows in this technique have a diameter of about 5 µm which is smaller than those reported using acousto-fluidic techniques.
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 life sciences, physics, and engineering. These include accurate force and torque measurement at the femtonewton level, microrheology of complex fluids, single micro- and nanoparticle 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.
Measurement of the viscoelastic properties of a cell using microscopic tracer particles has been complicated given that the medium viscosity is dependent upon the size of the measurement probe leading to reliability issues. Further, a technique for direct calibration of optically trapped particles in vivo has been elusive due to the frequency dependence and spatial inhomogeneity of the cytoplasmic viscosity, and the requirement of accurate knowledge of the medium refractive index. Here, we employ a recent extension of Jeffery’s model of viscoelasticity in the microscopic domain to fit the passive motional power spectra of micrometer-sized optically trapped particles embedded in a viscoelastic medium. We find excellent agreement between the 0 Hz viscosity in MCF7 cells and the typical values of viscosity in literature, between 2 to 16 mPa sec expected for the typical concentration of proteins inside the cytoplasmic solvent. This bypasses the dependence on probe size by relying upon small thermal displacements. Our measurements of the relaxation time also match values reported with magnetic tweezers, at about 0.1 s. Finally, we calibrate the optical tweezers and demonstrate the efficacy of the technique to the study of in vivo translational motion
Upconverting nanoparticles typically absorb low frequency radiation and emit at higher frequencies relying upon multiphoton processes. One such type of particle is NaYF 4 :Yb,Er, which absorbs at 975 nm while emitting in visible radiation. Such particles have routinely been optically trapped. However, we find that trapping at the absorption maximum induces non-equilibrium features to the system. When we ascertain the Mean Square Displacement (MSD) of the axial motion, we find features that resemble Hot Brownian Motion (HBM) in active particles. We characterize the HBM observed here and find that the effective translational velocity of the system is 36 nm/s, small enough to be compensated by the optical tweezers. Thus, we have a system which is optically confined and stationary but in non-equilibrium, which we can also use to study non-equilibrium fluctuations.
Optical trapping allows the trapping and manipulation
of dielectric
microparticles. However, full control over all six degrees of freedom
of the trapped object is challenging. Here, we use ferromagnetic iron-doped
upconversion microparticles for simultaneous optical trapping and
magnetic micromanipulation that allows full control over all translational
and rotational degrees of freedom. These microparticles have a low
absorption that allows optical trapping and a high coercivity and
saturation magnetization that allow magnetic manipulation. The particles
will enable micromanipulation experiments, for example, in single-molecule
biophysics.
Optical tweezers are powerful tools for high resolution study of surface properties. Such experiments are traditionally performed by studying the active or the brownian fluctuation of trapped particles in the X, Y, Z direction. Here we find that employing the fourth dimension, rotation, allows for sensitive and fast probing of the surface. Optical tweezers are capable of rotating trapped birefringent microparticles when applied with circularly polarized light, thus called the Rotational Optical Tweezers. When the trapped birefringent microparticle is far enough away from the surface, the rotation rate is dependent only on the laser power. However, we find that if one traps close to a surface, the rotation rate goes to zero even at finite tweezers laser powers for some specific type of substrates. We suspect this to be due to interaction between the substrate and the birefringent particle, keeping in mind that the hydrodynamic drag for this mode of rotation cannot increase beyond 1.2 times the drag away from the surface. We use this to probe some surfaces and find that there is no binding for hydrophobic ones but hydrophilic ones particularly tend to show a power threshold beyond which the birefringent particle starts rotating. We calculate that the threshold energy of the tweezers is consistent with the Van der Waals potential energy, when the mode of interaction with the surface is purely physical. We also find that for chitosan, the mode of interaction is possibly different from Van der Waals. We place the particle on the threshold and observe "stick-slip" kind of rotational behaviour.
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