Optical application and measurement of torque on microparticles of isotropic nonabsorbing material

By A. Bishop, T. Nieminen, N. Heckenberg, Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop. 2003

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show how it is possible to controllably rotate or align microscopic particles of isotropic nonabsorbing material in a TEM00 Gaussian beam trap, with simultaneous measurement of the applied torque using purely optical means. This is a simple and general method of rotation, requiring only that the particle is elongated along one direction. Thus, this method can be used to rotate or align a wide range of naturally occurring particles. The ability to measure the applied torque enables the use of this method as a quantitative tool - the rotational equivalent of optical tweezers based force measurement. As well as being of particular value for the rotation of biological specimens, this method is also suitable for the development of optically-driven micromachines.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f7b9cacef6b41eb7b6f60455949702995e10625

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop
2. T. Nieminen
3. N. Heckenberg
4. Miles J. Padgett
5. K. Bliokh
6. Franco Nori

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop
2. T. Nieminen
3. N. Heckenberg
4. Miles J. Padgett
5. K. Bliokh
6. Franco Nori

Citations in the corpus

• Optical tweezers computational toolbox (2007, methodology): “Since the torque due to spin is of practical interest (Nieminen, Heckenberg & Rubinsztein-Dunlop 2001, Bishop et al. 2003, Bishop et al. 2004), it is worthwhile to calculate this separately from the total torque.”