Characterization of microparticles with driven optical tweezers†
Abstract
We discuss how actively-driven optical tweezers may be used to characterize Brownian microparticles. Two experiments are described in detail. We follow the thermal fluctuations of a charged particle in an oscillatory electric field and demonstrate that charges as low as a few elementary charges can be measured accurately and reproducibly. Secondly, we measure the orientational dynamics of a trapped rotating droplet and use circular
- This article is part of the themed collection: The Spectroscopy and Dynamics of Microparticles