Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Holographic Optical Tweezers: Development And Analysis Of The First Holodeck Prototype, Matthew T. Dearing '00

Honors Projects

Tightly focused light can be used to non-invasively trap and manipulate micro-objects, a technique called "optical tweezing." By utilizing the large field gradients present in a focused laser beam, micro-particles-including biological specimens and many other materials-can become confined in all three dimensions. While optical tweezing has existed for over a decade, it has generally been limited to trapping one or two particles at a time. We have developed a technique that uses laser light to assemble large numbers of micro-particles in a highly controllable way. Here we describe, for the first time, the complete implementation of holographic optical tweezer arrays …