Working Paper Article Version 1 This version is not peer-reviewed

Positioning Accuracy in Holographic Optical Traps

Version 1 : Received: 25 March 2021 / Approved: 26 March 2021 / Online: 26 March 2021 (15:10:07 CET)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Català-Castro, F.; Martín-Badosa, E. Positioning Accuracy in Holographic Optical Traps. Micromachines 2021, 12, 559. Català-Castro, F.; Martín-Badosa, E. Positioning Accuracy in Holographic Optical Traps. Micromachines 2021, 12, 559.

Abstract

Spatial light modulators (SLMs) have been widely used to achieve dynamic control of optical traps. Often, holographic optical tweezers have been presumed to provide nanometer or sub-nanometer positioning accuracy. It is known that some features concerning the digitalized structure of SLMs cause a loss in steering efficiency of the optical trap, but their effect on trap positioning accuracy has been scarcely analyzed. On the one hand, the SLM look-up-table, which we found to depend on laser power, produces positioning deviations when the trap is moved at the micron scale. On the other hand, phase quantization, which makes linear phase gratings become phase staircase profiles, leads to unexpected local errors in the steering angle. We have tracked optically-trapped microspheres with sub-nanometer accuracy to study the effects on trap positioning, which can be as high as 2 nm in certain cases. We have also implemented a correction strategy that enabled the reduction of errors down to 0.3 nm.

Keywords

spatial light modulators; laser trapping; holographic optical tweezers

Subject

Physical Sciences, Acoustics

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