Optical trapping & manipulation for biomedical applications

In this lecture, I will begin with a few video demonstrations to illustrate the fun and the potential applications of optical trapping and manipulation followed by a discussion of optical trapping and tracking of the Brownian motion of the trapped particle for the calibration of the optical force constants to implement a simple photonics force microscopy (PFM) platform. Recent progresses in PFM, optical trap-and-stretch, oscillatory optical tweezers, and jumping optical tweezers (from my research group) will be presented, and potential biomedical applications of these techniques will be highlighted.