The effect of immersion oil in optical tweezers

Ali Mahmoudi, S. Nader, and S. Reihani

Optimized optical tweezers are of great importance for biological micromanipulation. In this paper, we present a detailed electromagnetic-based calculation of the spatial intensity distribution for a laser beam focused through a high numerical aperture objective when there are several discontinuities in the optical pathway of the system. For a common case of 3 interfaces we have shown that 0.01 increase in the refractive index of the immersion medium would shift the optimal trapping depth by 3–4μm (0.2–0.6μm) for aqueous (air) medium. For the first time, We have shown that the alteration of the refractive index of the immersion medium can be also used in aerosol trapping provided that larger increase in the refractive index is considered.

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