The transverse trapping forces on a dielectric sphere located at an oil-water interface are theoretically investigated with the ray-optics model. The transverse trapping forces rely on the internal property of the particle-interface system, and increase with either the decrease of three phase contact angles at the oil- water interface or the use of oil phase with low refractive index. The numerical results also show that the transverse trapping forces can be improved by either decreasing the numerical aperture of the microscope objective or shrinking the diameter of the trapping laser beam.
The Brownian motion of a polystyrene bead trapped in a time-sharing optical tweezers （TSOT） is numerically simulated by adopting Monte-Carlo technique. By analyzing the Brownian motion signal, the effective stiffness of a TSOT is acquired at different switching frequencies. Simulation results confirm that for a specific laser power and duty ratio, the effective stiffness varies with the frequency at low frequency range, while at high frequency range it keeps constant. Our results reveal that the switching frequency can be used to control the stability of time-sharing optical tweezers in a range.
Since RGD peptides （R： arginine; G： glycine; D： aspartic acid） are found to promote cell adhesion, they are modified at numerous materials surface for medical applications such as drug delivery and regenerative medicine. Peptide-cell surface interactions play a key role in the above applications. In this letter, we study the adhesion force between the RGD-coated bead and Hela cell surface by optical tweezes. The adhesion is dominated by the binding of α5β1 and RGD-peptide with higher adhesion probability and stronger adhesion strength compared with the adhesion of bare bead and cell surface. The binding force for a single α5β1 -GRGDSP pair is determined to be 16.8 pN at a loading rate of 1.5 nN/s. The unstressed off-rate is 1.65 × 10^-2s^-1 and the distance of transition state for the rigid binding model is 3.0 nm.
