Abstract

In the early 1970s Ashkin and his coworkers pioneered the optical trapping of smaller dielectric particles with laser beams¹. Laser optical traps or optical tweezers have then found wide applications in various fields including acoustics, biology, biomedicine, and microchemistry. Optical tweezers are directly used to micromanipulate cells and intra-cellular organelles, or by coating beads with materials like myosin, optical tweezers are used to control the moving of beads which are treated as handles for cell manipulations. Due to the isotropic or symmetric properties of cells or beads, cell rotational control is hardly achieved in a laser optical traps. In this presentation we will demonstrate the cell manipulation, including not only the linear translations but also rotations, by using irregular-shaped diamond particles as handles for optical tweezers.

© 2000 IEEE