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Abstract Philip JONES
In 2018 Arthur Ashkin was awarded a half share of that year’s Nobel Prize in Physics “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”. The work for which he was recognised had its origins more than thirty years before, and in the years since their invention the uses of optical tweezers have grown far beyond biological systems, with numerous diverse applications across the chemical and physical sciences also. Figure 1 illustrates the range of objects for which optical trapping has been successfully demonstrated, covering five orders of magnitude in size, and ranging from single atoms to cells.
Figure 1: Optical trapping over a range of length scales. This figure illustrates the diverse nature of objects spanning five orders of magnitude in size that have been trapped an manipulated using optical tweezers
In this talk I will briefly introduce the concept of radiation pressure and the mechanism by which light can exert a force on matter leading to the realisation of an optical trap. I will then examine notable examples of work from our group where the “light touch” of optical tweezers has proved invaluable. Here we will pay particular attention to applications involving nanomaterials including carbon nanotubes [1], graphene [2] and other 2D materials [3], and biological materials including erythrocytes [4,5] and stem cells [6].