Positional stability of holographic optical traps

The potential of digital holography for complex manipulation of micron-sized particles with optical tweezers has been clearly demonstrated. By contrast, its use in quantitative experiments has been rather limited, partly due to fluctuations introduced by the spatial light modulator (SLM) that displa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Optics express 2011-10, Vol.19 (22), p.21370-21384
Main Authors: Farré, Arnau, Shayegan, Marjan, López-Quesada, Carol, Blab, Gerhard A, Montes-Usategui, Mario, Forde, Nancy R, Martín-Badosa, Estela
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Fotònica
Holografia
Holography
Instruments òptics
Lasers
Làsers
Optical instruments
Photonics
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Summary:The potential of digital holography for complex manipulation of micron-sized particles with optical tweezers has been clearly demonstrated. By contrast, its use in quantitative experiments has been rather limited, partly due to fluctuations introduced by the spatial light modulator (SLM) that displays the kinoforms. This is an important issue when high temporal or spatial stability is a concern. We have investigated the performance of both an analog-addressed and a digitally-addressed SLM, measuring the phase fluctuations of the modulated beam and evaluating the resulting positional stability of a holographic trap. We show that, despite imparting a more unstable modulation to the wavefront, our digitally-addressed SLM generates optical traps in the sample plane stable enough for most applications. We further show that traps produced by the analog-addressed SLM exhibit a superior pointing stability, better than 1 nm, which is comparable to that of non-holographic tweezers. These results suggest a means to implement precision force measurement experiments with holographic optical tweezers (HOTs).
ISSN:1094-4087
1094-4087
DOI:10.1364/OE.19.021370