Roadmap for Optical Tweezers 2023 

Giovanni Volpe, Onofrio M Marago, Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop, Giuseppe Pesce, Alexander Stilgoe, Giorgio Volpe, Georgiy Tkachenko, Viet Giang Truong, Sile Nic Chormaic, Fatemeh Kalantarifard, Parviz Elahi, Mikael Kall, Agnese Callegari, Manuel Marqués, Antonio Neves, Rosalba Saija, Paul Beck, Jörg Eismann, Peter Banzer, Thales Fernandes, Francesco Pedaci, Warwick Bowen, Basudev Roy, Gregor Thalhammer, Monika Ritsch-Marte, Laura Perez Garcia, Alejandro Arzola, Isaac Perez Castillo, Aykut Argun, Till Moritz Muenker, Bart Eduard Vos, Peter Reece, Fan Wang, David McGloin, Romain Quidant, Reece Roberts, Cyril Laplane, Thomas Volz, Reuven Gordon, Dag Hanstorp, Javier Marmolejo, Kishan Dholakia, Tongcang Li, Oto Brzobohaty, Stephen H Simpson, Pavel Zemanek, Felix Ritort, Yael Roichman, Valeria Bobkova, Raphael Wittkowski, Cornelia Denz, Timo Betz, Ilaria Cristiani, G V Pavan Kumar, Pietro Gucciardi, Marco Capitanio, Lynn Paterson, Philip Jones, Kristine Berg-Sorensen, Younes Barooji, Lene B Oddershede, Daryl Preece, Caroline Beck Adiels, Anna Chiara De Luca, Maria Antonia Iatì and Grover A Swartzlander

 

Optical tweezers are tools made of light that enable contactless pushing, trapping, and manipulation of objects ranging from atoms to space light sails. Since the pioneering work by Arthur Ashkin in the 1970s, optical tweezers have evolved into sophisticated instruments and have been employed in a broad range of applications in life sciences, physics, and engineering. These include accurate force and torque measurement at the femtonewton level, microrheology of complex fluids, single micro- and nanoparticle spectroscopy, single-cell analysis, and statistical-physics experiments. This roadmap provides insights into current investigations involving optical forces and optical tweezers from their theoretical foundations to designs and setups. It also offers perspectives for applications to a wide range of research fields, from biophysics to space exploration.