Symposium on Optical Forces: from atoms to soft-matter

On Wed 26 Feb 14 the OSA Messina Student Chapter and EPS Young Minds Group Messina wil be holding a one-day symposium on Optical Forces at the IPCF-CNR (Messina). The programme for the day includes:

• J. J. Saenz (University of Madrid) Scattering asymmetry and non-conservative optical forces on small particles (OSA Lecture)
• P. H. Jones (University College London) Evanescent wave traps and optical binding of particles
• G. Pesce (University of Naples) Surface charge and hydrodynamic coefficient measurements of micro-particles and living micro-organisms by Optical Tweezers
• M. G. Donato (IPCF-CNR) Optical trapping of nanostructures
• C. J. Foot (University of Oxford) Laser cooling and trapping of atoms – past and present (Young Minds Lecture)
• G. Volpe (Bilkent University) Speckle optical tweezers: Tunable anomalous diffusion and selective optical manipulation
• O. M. Maragò (IPCF–CNR) Fano-Doppler laser cooling of hybrid nanostructures

Xiang Han joins the Optical Tweezers Group

Xiang Han has joined the UCL Optical Tweezers Group as a visiting student.   Xiang is a PhD student in the College of Optoelectronic Science & Engineering at the National Defense University, Changsha, Hunan, China.  His visit is funded by an award from the China Scholarship Council.  Xiang will be working with us until 2016 on a number of optical binding experiments.

PhD studentship available

A PhD studentship is available to start in September 2014 on a project entitled Membrane engineering of artificial lipid vesicles. The goal of this project is to use optical tweezers to probe the mehanical properties of biomimetic vesicles undergoing temperature or light-induced phase or structural transformation, and to use the results of these studies to engineer membrane materials with properties optimised for applications including controlled drug release and microreactors.

Experimental work will be carried out in the Optical Tweezers Group in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UCL and in the Biological Soft Matter Group in the School of Materials Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (JAIST).  The project is jointly supervised by Dr Phil Jones (UCL) and Dr Tsutomu Hamada (JAIST).

The studentship will pay a stipend and fees at the rate applicable for UK/EU students for three years.  The student will be registered for a PhD at UCL where they will spend the first and third years.  The second year of the PhD will be spent at JAIST.

Please contact Dr Phil Jones for further details or to express an interest.

AMOP Physics Open Day

The Atomic Molecular Optical and Positron Physics group will be holding an Open Day on Wednesday December 4th 2013 at 13:00.  The Open Day will be held in rooms A1 and E7 located on the Physics building on UCL's main Gower Street Campus. 

The agenda of the day is: 

13:00 - 15:00  Short research presentations by AMOPP faculty (A1)

15:00 - 18:00  Poster presentations by research groups (E7)

15:00 - 17:00 Lab tours

Please see here for further details of how to get to us.

Review paper in Nature Nanotechnology

Our paper 'Optical trapping and manipulation of nanostructures' has been published in Nature Nanotechnology 8 807-819 (2013).

From the abstract:  Optical trapping and manipulation of micrometre-sized particles was first reported in 1970. Since then, it has been successfully implemented in two size ranges: the subnanometre scale, where light–matter mechanical coupling enables cooling of atoms, ions and molecules, and the micrometre scale, where the momentum transfer resulting from light scattering allows manipulation of microscopic objects such as cells. But it has been difficult to apply these techniques to the intermediate — nanoscale — range that includes structures such as quantum dots, nanowires, nanotubes, graphene and two-dimensional crystals, all of crucial importance for nanomaterials-based applications. Recently, however, several new approaches have been developed and demonstrated for trapping plasmonic nanoparticles, semiconductor nanowires and carbon nanostructures. Here we review the state-of-the-art in optical trapping at the nanoscale, with an emphasis on some of the most promising advances, such as controlled manipulation and assembly of individual and multiple nanostructures, force measurement with femtonewton resolution, and biosensors.

Bragg Lecture 2013 by Prof Paul Chaikin

The 2013 Bragg Lecture will take place on Wed 30 October, and will be given by Prof Paul Chaikin (New York University) on Some small steps towards artificial life.

Abstract: The properties we often associate with living things are motility, metabolism, self-replication and evolution. According to the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman: “What I can’t create, I don’t understand”. We thought we’d give it a shot - understanding life - and in the process we’ve made two different systems, one that exhibits both autonomous motility and metabolism and another which is the first artificial system that can replicate arbitrarily designed motifs. The first system, artificial swimmers, provides insight into many natural phenomena such as a flocking of birds and schooling of fish. The second system uses diurnal cycles of temperature and light and at present is doubling each cycle, growing exponentially. It provides a new way of producing many, many copies of nanoscale devices and may give insights into the origin of conventional life on earth.  We even have initiated an elementary form of evolution.

Marios Sergides PhD viva

Congratulations to Optical Tweezers PhD student Marios Sergides who has successfully defended his PhD thesis on Optical manipulation of micro-and nanoparticles using evansecent fields.  Marios will be leaving the group to start a postdoc with a Japan Sciety for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), Japan, in the Light-Matter Interactions Unit under the supervision of Dr Sile Nic Chormaic.  Many thanks to Dr Mark Ellerby (UCL) and Dr Valeria Garbin (Imperial College) for acting as examiners.

Well done Dr Sergides, and good luck in Japan!