Development of Multiple Beam Optical Tweezers

This paper presents the design of a multiple beam optical tweezers instrument used for manipulating micro/nano-sized components. The basic equations used in designing the optical tweezers are derived and the stable and time-sharing multiple beam optical tweezers are constructed with scanning mirrors. The laser beam passes through a series of optical components such as lenses, mirrors, and scanning mirrors, and overfills the entrance aperture of microscope objective, which gives a stable trap. By rotating the laser beam with the scanning mirror, the focal positions are translated in the specimen plane and multiple micro/nano-sized objects can be moved. The constructed optical tweezers is used to manipulate cells and liposomes simultaneously and to trap multiple nano-wires. The experiments prove that the developed optical tweezers can be a very versatile manipulation tool for studying gene therapy and nano device fabrication.