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Optical tweezers provide the possibility of confining micro and nano-particles in a well-characterized environment by employing forces imparted by light. The particles thus trapped can be used to reveal the physics of light matter interactions in the meso-scale, as well as probes for multifarious applications including force-spectroscopy on cells and proteins, micro-rheology, and hydrodynamic interactions. In this lecture, I will give a brief introduction to optical tweezers and the various interesting science that can be performed using the tweezers, and also provide an overview of our work with the tweezers systems we have developed over the last four years. |