Spalding Co-Authors Article on Optical Tweezers in Physics World

Oct. 10, 2002

Gabe Spalding, associate professor of physics at Illinois Wesleyan University, is co-author of an article in the October issue of Physics World.

The article, "Optical tweezers: the next generation," describes the state-of-the-art in optical tweezers, which have been widely used for almost two decades and is a technique that is built upon the principle that small particles/objects can be trapped in the waist of a strongly focused laser beam. As the article notes, the ability to remotely control matter with lasers has now reached the point where researchers can construct new types of material.

Spalding and his co-authors, Kishan Dholakia and Michael MacDonald of St. Andrews University in Scotland write that "We can think of optical tweezers as a key component in an 'optical toolkit' that can be used in a wide range of experimental research. Every toolkit needs rotary drives and the optical toolkit offers several non-contact ways of driving gears in micromachines." Further, they note, that there exists "immense interest in the use of optical tweezers for fundamental research in physics, such as recent theoretical and experimental work on the orbital angular momentum of light."

Spalding is currently on sabbatical leave in Scotland where he is pursuing research on dynamic hologram optical tweezers, multiple trap optical tweezers, evanescent wave tweezing as well as studies of colloids in optical potentials with the Optical Trapping Group, including the co-authors of the Physics World article.

A member of the Illinois Wesleyan faculty since 1996, Spalding is director of the University's Laboratory for Mesoscopics and Quantum Microscopies where he and his students have helped to develop two techniques for optical trapping and manipulation.

To read an abstract of the Physics World article, click here.

To download the pdf file of the complete article, click here.