Highly controllable optical tweezers using dynamic electronic holograms

Dielectric particles including living cells are trapped within focused laser beam spots, and as a result, they can be transferred by displacing the beam spots. Such the particle manipulating technique is called optical tweezers. Holographic optical tweezers (HOT) enables highly flexible and precise control of particles, introducing holography technique to them. HOT is one of the most expected techniques for investigations of cell-cell signaling which require precise arraying of living cells. We had developed a new highly controllable HOT system where two different intensity patterns, a carrier beam spot and a beam array, are generated quasi-simultaneously by time-division multiplexing. Particles are transferred to the beam array by the carrier beam spot displaced in real time by phase shifting of holograms. In this review, we introduce our work, the construction of the system, demonstration of manipulating particles and investigations of the spatio- temporal stability of trapped particles in our system.