Structured Light and Its Applications

Chapter 6 Holographic Optical Tweezers

Gabriel C. Spalding¹, Johannes Courtial², Roberto Di Leonardo³,

¹Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL, USA

²University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

³Università di Roma, Italy

6.1 BACKGROUND

All around the world, hobbyists and collectors take great pride in the workmanship put into miniaturizations, producing small train sets with clear windows and seats in the cars, and tiny buildings with working doors and detailed interiors. Clearly though, as the size is further reduced, model building becomes more and more a painstaking task, and we are all the more in awe of what has been produced. Ultimately, as we move toward the microscopic scale, we find that for the creation and assembly of machines—or ...