Optical Tweezers at Long Range and High Pressure (Creativity @ Home)

光镊仅仅利用光本身的轻触来移动微观物体。20多年来，科学家们一直使用光学镊子来探索自然界中的微小力量——在皮牛顿/纳米尺度上观察和测量单个细胞、细菌和生物马达的运动。镊子的一个问题是，它们需要非常强大的透镜，这意味着光学陷阱通常距离透镜本身不到一毫米。这种短范围的光学镊子限制了它们的应用，这是我们寻求克服的限制。我们将与一些国际合作伙伴共同建立一个便携式技术演示器，其中捕获点可以在简单的镜子上方几毫米，距离镜头10毫米。我们刚刚证明，这些镜子陷阱可以通过电子方式增强，以提供与传统镊子相似的性能。我们希望再次与我们的合作者一起说明这样一个系统如何能够允许超越传统系统范围的科学。例如，我们将展示超高压电池内的光学捕获，这种电池的金刚石窗对于传统系统来说太厚了。我们将在高达1GigaPascal的压力下捕获，探索由此产生的粘度的奇怪变化，例如，看看细菌是否还能游泳。我们将使用增加的光学通道来测量第一原理的光力——解决光束真正产生多少力的老难题。这个项目是通过整个扩展组的创造力在家中确定的，并制定了类似的项目计划。

Optical tweezers move microscopic objects around using nothing more than the gentle touch of light itself. For over 20 years scientists have used optical tweezers to explore the small forces in nature - to watch and measure the motion of individual cells, bacteria and biomotors on a piconewton/nanometre scale. One problem with tweezers is that they require very powerful lenses meaning that the optical trap is usually less than a millimetre from the lens itself. This short range of the optical tweezers limits their application and it is this limitation we seek to overcome.Jointly with some of our international collaborators we will build a portable technology demonstrator where the trapping point can be a few mm above a simple mirror and 10mm away from the lens. We have just shown that these mirror traps can be electronically enhanced to give similar performance to a traditional tweezers.Again with our collaborators we wish to illustrate how such a system can allow science that is beyond the range of traditional systems. For example we will show optical trapping within an ultra-high pressure cell, which typically have diamond windows too thick for traditional systems. We will trap at pressure up to 1GigaPascal exploring the strange changes in resulting viscosity and, for example, look at whether bacteria can still swim. We will use the increased optical access to measure optical forces from first principles - addressing the age old dilemma of how much force a light beam really produces.This project was identified through creativity @ home from across the extend group with a project plan that was similarly devised.