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Presenter: Adarsh Lalitha Ravindranath
Supervisor:

Date: Fri, July 19, 2019
Time: 13:30:00 - 14:30:00
Place: EOW 430

ABSTRACT

Arthur Ashkin’s Nobel Prize winning single-beam gradient force optical tweezers has revolutionized research in various fields of science. It has enabled many atomic and single molecular studies, proving to be an essential tool for observing and understanding nature at the nanoscale. This talk brings to focus the single-beam gradient force optical tweezers and the advances necessary to overcome the limitations inherent in conventional techniques of optical trapping. Plasmonic nanoaperture optical trapping using double-nanohole apertures is introduced as a solution to overcoming these limitations. The talk highlights the achievement in aperture fabrication methods and improvements to experimental techniques adopted in single molecular optical trapping studies. Improvements to enable tuning of aperture diameter and cusp separation is presented as one of the key components of recent research that allows designing of double-nanohole apertures optimized for optical trapping. Results from transmission characterization of various apertures fabricated using colloidal lithography, carried out both experimentally and estimated by computational electrodynamics simulations using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, are presented. Optical trapping results of nanoparticles and bio-molecules with double-nanohole apertures fabricated using colloidal lithography are shown. This technique is proven to be an effective tool for single molecular studies and is expected to be a step towards the future of plasmonic nanoaperture optical trapping research.