The first example Prof. Jones will present in this webinar is the stretching of red blood cells in a dual optical tweezers. The cells are obtained from patients exhibiting a number of eye conditions that present with different symptoms. He determines the deformability (resistance to stretching) of the red blood cells and shows that a change in deformability is correlated with particular symptoms.

The second example is droplets of oil-in-water microemulsions, which can be re-shaped by optical forces. Prof. Jones implements a number of techniques to characterize the droplet interfacial tension including thermal fluctuations of the droplet surface, and the relaxation rate following deformation. He exploits the temperature sensitivity of the interfacial tension in the region of the phase inversion temperature to allow him to estimate the heating effect of optical tweezers.

What You Will Learn:

• The concept of optical tweezers
• How to apply optical tweezers for trapping and measurement of the deformability of soft materials
• Two exemplary materials: red blood cells and droplets of oil-in-water microemulsions

Who Should Attend:

• Physicists, biologists, chemists and engineers interested in optical trapping, biotechnology, structured light, biological physics, and biosensing research

About the Presenter: Phil Jones, University College London

Phil Jones is a professor of Physics at University College London (UCL). He studied at Cambridge University, Imperial College London and Oxford University, where he obtained his doctorate working on laser cooling and optical lattices. Since 2004 he has lead the Optical Tweezers Group at UCL, where his research interests include optical trapping, optical binding and their application to biological, nanoscopic and soft materials. In 2015 he co-authored the book “Optical Tweezers: Principles & Applications” with Onofrio Maragò and Giovanni Volpe.