In situ calibrating optical tweezers with sinusoidal-wave drag force method

Li Di, Zhou Jin-Hua, Hu Xin-Yao, Zhong Min-Cheng, Gong Lei, Wang Zi-Qiang, Wang Hao-Wei and Li Yin-Mei

We introduce a corrected sinusoidal-wave drag force method (SDFM) into optical tweezers to calibrate the trapping stiffness of the optical trap and conversion factor (CF) of photodetectors. First, the theoretical analysis and experimental result demonstrate that the correction of SDFM is necessary, especially the error of no correction is up to 11.25% for a bead of 5 μm in diameter. Second, the simulation results demonstrate that the SDFM has a better performance in the calibration of optical tweezers than the triangular-wave drag force method (TDFM) and power spectrum density method (PSDM) at the same signal-to-noise ratio or trapping stiffness. Third, in experiments, the experimental standard deviations of calibration of trapping stiffness and CF with the SDFM are about less than 50% of TDFM and PSDM especially at low laser power. Finally, the experiments of stretching DNA verify that the in situ calibration with the SDFM improves the measurement stability and accuracy.

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