Roadmap for Optical Tweezers 2023

Optical tweezers are tools made of light that enable contactless pushing, trapping, and manipulation of objects ranging from atoms to space light sails. Since the pioneering work by Arthur Ashkin in the 1970s, optical tweezers have evolved into sophisticated instruments and have been employed in a broad range of applications in life sciences, physics, and engineering. These include accurate force and torque measurement at the femtonewton level, microrheology of complex fluids, single micro- and nanoparticle spectroscopy, single-cell analysis, and statistical-physics experiments. This roadmap provides insights into current investigations involving optical forces and optical tweezers from their theoretical foundations to designs and setups. It also offers perspectives for applications to a wide range of research fields, from biophysics to space exploration

Distribution of the model-derived quantities response time, amplitude, and duration.

<p>A. Illustration of response time, (negative) response amplitude in % of baseline, and duration of half-maximal response. Distribution of activation (B), amplitude (C), and duration, for experiment 1 and 2 (blue), experiment 3 (pink), and experiment 4 (yellow). The typical cells (median response) are indicated by vertical dashed lines. Distributions of the model-derived quantities were determined from 100 000 Monte Carlo simulations per experiment.</p

Illustration of the mathematical model.

<p>Extracellular glucose is controlling the rate of production of nuclear Mig1 and a hypothetical component X. The level of X in turn modulates the degradation of nuclear Mig1.</p

Parameter estimates.

<p>Parameter estimates.</p

Visualization of all single cell data.

<p>Time-series data of fluorescent light intensity for nuclear Mig1 in single cells, shown for the four different experiments. At time zero, the extracellular glucose concentration is changed according to <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0124050#pone.0124050.t001" target="_blank">Table 1</a>.</p

Experiments.

<p>Experiments.</p

The distribution of maximum a posteriori <i>η</i>.

<p>For experiments 1 to 4 (A to D), the EBEs of <i>η</i>₂ and <i>η</i>₃ are shown as red points. The regions of one and two standard deviations of a normal distribution fitted to the EBEs, and the NLME population estimate of the distribution of <i>η</i>₂ and <i>η</i>₃, are shown as black and filled gray ellipses, respectively.</p

The distribution of EBEs of <i>η</i> for all cells in all experiments.

<p>The EBEs from individual cells are color-coded according to the experiments in which their data was produced using blue, pink, yellow, and green, for experiments 1 to 4, respectively.</p