Particle–wall interactions are important in biology, micromachining, coagulation studies, and many other areas of science. As a contactless tool, optical tweezers are ideal for measuring these kind of interactions. Here we will present a new method for calculating the non-optical forces acting on a trapped particle using simultaneous position and force detection. Analysis of the particle's Brownian motion when trapped gives a measure of all the forces experienced by the particle. In contrast, measuring only the light's momentum change directly gives the solely optical force. This is achieved measuring the changes in the scattered light. The difference between the forces recorded by the two techniques reveals the external forces acting on the trapped particle. Therefore, by trapping the particle close to a wall, one can study the particle-wall interaction force in details. The simulation were done using the optical tweezer toolbox [1] to find the optical force acting on a particle. The net force was calculated from a Brownian motion’s statistics of a trapped particle in the presence of the exponential external force. By using the proposed method, we were able to successfully reconstruct the external force. The experiment was done on a trapped spherical PMMA particle (d=2.2um) close to the 3D-printed wall. For the particle-wall distance ~0.7um the non-optical force is ~100fN . The experiment and simulation results confirm the efficiency of the proposed method for an external force measurements. [1] Nieminen et al., J. Opt. A 9, S196-S203 (2007).
Boundary walls have a strong influence on the drag force on optically trapped object near surface. Faxen’s correction has shown how a flat surface modifies the hydrodynamic drag. However, to date, the effect of curved walls at microscopic scale on both translational and rotational movement of micro-objects has not been studied. Here we describe our experiments which aim to study the drag force on optically trapped particles moving near walls with different curvatures.
The curved walls were made using 3D laser nano-printing (Nanoscribe), and optical tweezers were used to trap micro-objects near the walls. The translational and rotational motion of the optically trapped particle is related to the drag coefficients. By monitoring the change in the motion of particle, we determined the increase in drag force for particles translating or rotating at different distances from surfaces with different curvatures.
These results are essential for calibrating the drag force on particles, and thus enable accurate rheology at the micron-scale. This opens the potential for microrheology under different conditions, such as within microdevices, biological cells and studies of biological processes
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