Optimizing light-matter interaction on the biophotonics workstation

Bañas, A., Palima, D., Tauro, S., Glückstad, J.

Researchers overcome the limitation of range of motion in the axial direction for tweezer-based traps that needed high-intensity regions and high numerical-apertures (NA) by using a counter-propagating beam geometry of the BioPhotonics Workstation. The BioPhotonics Workstation featured real-time reconfigurable counter-propagating beam traps. Intensity patterns defining the optical traps were directly mapped into an addressable light-shaping module, minimizing computational overhead. Axial manipulation was achieved by balancing the intensity ratios of the counter-propagating beams. The axial degree of freedom enabled the flipping of planar microstructures and lifting puzzle pieces of reconfigurable microenvironments. The use of low NA objectives also allowed a wide range of axial manipulation and more freedom on the sample containers.

DOI