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Friday, April 17, 2009

Trapping and manipulating gas bubbles in water with ultrashort laser pulses at a high repetition rate

S. V. Oshemkov, L. P. Dvorkin and V. Yu. Dmitriev

We have experimentally observed the trapping of a gas bubble in water by focused laser radiation. The optical trap was provided by 200-fs pulses of a Ti-sapphire laser operating at a repetition rate of 100 kHz. The laser radiation was focused in water by an objective with a numerical aperture of 0.5. The trapping force in water is estimated as ∼200 pN at an average laser power of 20 mW, which is by two orders of magnitude greater than the efficiency of a traditional laser tweezers. The trapping force arises upon local heating of gas inside a bubble due to nonlinear absorption in the focal region.

DOI

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