Optical Tweezers as Scientific Tools: Applications and Techniques

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past three decades, optical tweezers have become a key scientific instrument in many research fields, spanning from biology and medicine to quantum physics with ultra-cold atoms and opto-mechanics. Current state-of-the-art systems used to generate and control optical tweezers range from custom research-grade implementations to full turn-key commercial devices. Many novel approaches have been developed to improve the performance and broaden the applicability of these optical tools, such as multiplexing the number of beams, leveraging non-Gaussian wavefronts and dynamically controlling their properties, such as intensity, position and shape. Although several of these advancements have been well presented and discussed through scientific publications and reports, specialized knowledge from the user side is still required to properly leverage them to conduct an experiment of interest.

With this Special Issue, we are aiming to reduce the gap between optical tweezer developers and users. Our aim is to cover the whole range of their applications, including industrial use-cases, and highlight the methods and technical requirements and protocols that must be implemented to achieve the best performances and accurate results. The potential topics of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Any application where particles are trapped or manipulated;
• Applications in biology and medicine;
• Applications in biophysics;
• Applications in ultra-cold atom physics;
• Applications in quantum optics and optomechanics;
• Engineering and industrial uses;
• Measurement techniques that involve or benefit from optical tweezers, including experimental improvements of previous realizations;
• Active and passive approaches to generate optical tweezers;
• Methods to statically or dynamically control their position, shape, intensity, trajectory, polarization, etc.;
• Methods to multiplex the number of beams;
• Open and closed loop approaches to control the beam point spread function;
• Laser beam modes that differ from the Gaussian modes, including their realization and application.

Dr. Vladislav Gavryusev
Guest Editor

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