Abstract

The techniques of confocal microscopy and optical tweezers have shown themselves to be powerful tools in biological and medical research. We combine these methods to develop a minimally invasive instrument that is capable of making hydrodynamic measurements more rapidly than is possible with other devices. This result leads to the possibility of making scanning images of the viscosity distribution of materials around biopolymer-producing cells. $100\times 100$ images can be taken with $0.5‐\mathit{\mu }\mathrm{m}$ spatial resolution in 3 min. An image of the viscosity distribution around a pullulan-producing cell of Aureobasidium pullulans is shown as an example.

© 2002 Optical Society of America

Measuring microscopic viscosity with optical tweezers as a confocal probe

Boaz A. Nemet and Mark Cronin-Golomb
Appl. Opt. 42(10) 1820-1832 (2003)

Microscopic flow measurements with optically trapped microprobes

Boaz A. Nemet and Mark Cronin-Golomb
Opt. Lett. 27(15) 1357-1359 (2002)

Fast position measurements with scanning line optical tweezers

Rajalakshmi Nambiar and Jens-Christian Meiners
Opt. Lett. 27(10) 836-838 (2002)

Blinking Optical Tweezers for microrheology measurements of weak elasticity complex fluids

Giuseppe Pesce, Giulia Rusciano, and Antonio Sasso
Opt. Express 18(3) 2116-2126 (2010)

Optical shield: measuring viscosity of turbid fluids using optical tweezers

M. P. Lee, A. Curran, G. M. Gibson, M. Tassieri, N. R. Heckenberg, and M. J. Padgett
Opt. Express 20(11) 12127-12132 (2012)