Pitch-rotational manipulation of single cells and particles using single-beam thermo-optical tweezers

3D pitch rotation of microparticles and cells assumes importance in a wide variety of applications in biology, physics, chemistry and medicine. Applications such as cell imaging and injection benefit from pitch-rotational manipulation. Generation of such motion in single beam optical tweezers has remained elusive due to the complexities of generating high enough ellipticity perpendicular to the direction of propagation. Further, trapping a perfectly spherical object at two locations and subsequent pitch rotation hasn’t yet been demonstrated to be possible. Here, we use hexagonal-shaped upconverting particles and single cells trapped close to a gold-coated glass cover slip in a sample chamber to generate complete 360 degree and continuous pitch motion even with a single optical tweezer beam. The tweezers beam passing through the gold surface is partially absorbed and generates a hot-spot to produce circulatory convective flows in the vicinity which rotates the objects. The rotation rate can be controlled by the intensity of the laser light. Thus such a simple configuration can turn the particle in the pitch sense. The circulatory flows in this technique have a diameter of about 5 μ m which is smaller than those reported using acousto-fluidic techniques.