Study of some soft matter systems using optical tweezers
ABSTRACT :
Optical tweezers are a very useful tool in physics, chemistry and biology. Although translational motion of trapped particles have been extensively studied, rotations are also being studied more recently. Of the rotations, in-plane or yaw motion has been developed over the last couple of decades. In this presentation, we explore yaw motion first and then move on to explore the first out-of-plane rotation which we call pitch motion in the nomenclature of the airlines.
We discuss our new method to generate yaw rotations with low ellipticity beams. Then, we use the yaw rotation to study adhesivity of surfaces. We move on to detect pitch motion at high resolution and explore cell biological applications. Lastly, we explore strategies for calibration of optical tweezers inside cells.