Topic
Optical trapping and manipulation research, explained
7 open-access optical trapping and manipulation studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Can a flat chip make selective acoustic tweezers?
A flat spiral-shaped transducer produces a tightly focused swirling sound beam that can grab and move one particle without disturbing its neighbours.
- Can a living cell act as a lens that beats the diffraction limit?
A spherical cell half-submerged in water and held above a mirror focuses light into a spot small enough to image 100 nm features and trap single nanoparticles.
- Can heat let light pull particles toward its source?
Light heating one side of a silicon particle creates an electric field in the surrounding soap solution that pulls the particle backward toward the light.
- How does a virus shell assemble around its DNA, step by step?
SV40 capsid proteins first kink and loop the DNA within minutes, then slowly lock together into stronger intermediates until a complete, force-resistant shell forms.
- Can fat droplets inside cells work as tiny lenses?
Natural fat droplets inside cells bend light like microscopic lenses, and moving them with an optical trap made faint fluorescent structures several times brighter and easier to resolve.
- Can rotating a trapped cell with light fix blurry 3D microscopy?
Rotating free-floating particles and cells with light traps shaped like the sample itself filled in missing 3D information and made depth resolution about twice as sharp.
- Why do light-driven microrotors orbit against their own spin?
Tiny disks carrying two light-bending gratings spin in a laser beam, and groups of them orbit the beam in the opposite direction because of a sideways optical force.