A Real-time Interactive Control System for Optical Manipulation of Microparticles using Liquid Crystal Display

This paper describes a control system for realtime interactive manipulation of microparticles using optoelectronic tweezers (OET) on a liquid crystal display. The OET is a powerful tool for trapping and manipulation of microparticles via image-induced dielectrophoresis (DEP). We develop a new control system for the real-time interactive manipulation of microparticles using OET. Our control system is successfully demonstrated to the real-time interactive manipulation of 75 mum polystyrene beads using a liquid crystal display. The velocity of 75 mum polystyrene particle is measured to be 25 mum/s. The microparticles trapped by a virtual DEP cage are formed a single particle array within only a few minutes. This interactive OET system can be utilized to several biological and medical applications including cell patterning and bead-based protein assays.