Optical tweezers: building bridges between the micro and macro worlds

Optical tweezers facilitate the in-depth study and intricate manipulation of microscopic entities which often have larger macroscopic relevance. We shall present two such scenarios, where in the first case, we revisit the driven coupled oscillator problem, albeit in a viscous liquid [1]. Interestingly, we observe a motional resonance in the response of the driven oscillator, which can be used to measure the bulk viscosity of the liquid for large oscillator separations. Then, we describe a new micro-lithography technique based on self-assembly driven by a micro-bubble grown in thermo-optical tweezers. Using this, we have simultaneously synthesized, doped, and patterned highly-conducting polymers [2], which can have direct applications in solution printed electronics.

1. Shuvojit Paul, Abhrajit Laskar, Rajesh Singh, Basudev Roy, R. Adhikari, Ayan Banerjee,  arXiv:1707.00660 [cond-mat.soft]. 
2. Subhrokoli Ghosh,  Santu Das,  Shuvojit Paul,  Preethi Thomas,  Basudev Roy,  Partha Mitra, Soumyajit Roy  and  Ayan Banerjee, J. Mater. Chem. C, 5, 6718-6728, (2017)