Optische Pinzette mit Doppelfalle sowie Teilchennachverfolgung

• Subject Area: Condensed Matter Physics
• Term: Funded in 2010
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 181799901

„Compared to our established custom made single beam optical tweezers setup with video detection, a commercial dual beam optical tweezers device with bifocal four-quadrant-diode detection, will have several significant conceptual advantages. The most outstanding benefit is to be found in the much higher temporal resolution of approximately 10 μs. This would enable us to study single biochemical pair interaction events, like receptor-ligand-interaction, in a much more precise and detailed fashion than it is feasible with the present equipment. Moreover, a significantly increased temporal particle tracking resolution would provide us with the capability to continue and advance our experimental research on the novel and promising branch of stochastic thermo-dynamics. Furthermore, a dual beam configuration with optical traps being freely steerable in space and strength offers an increased temporal stability against drift effects during any kind of two-colloid experiments. As a result, this configuration is considerably superior compared to our present single beam pipette approach and will lead to improved results. In combination with the technically required flat design of the used fluidic cells, these freely steerable traps allow a comparably easy implementation of an automated seek-and-trap algorithm. Such an auto-trapping algorithm would be a major step forward towards a complete automation of the pertinent experiments which would eventually enable us to measure single biochemical and biophysical events with reasonably high throughput and statistics.“

• DFG Programme: Major Research Instrumentation
• Instrumentation Group: 5700 Festkörper-Laser
• Applicant Institution: Universität Leipzig
• Leaders: Professor Dr. Friedrich Kremer, until 3/2015; Professor Dr. Ralf Seidel, since 4/2015