Welcome to the website of the Optical Manipulation Group

The Optical Manipulation Group, based in the School of Physics & Astronomy, works in a variety of research areas of optical physics and biophysics.  Our research is focused on the development of optical micromanipulation techniques, the investigation of novel light fields, the characterisation of particle dynamics (at the atomic, nano, and micron scale) in optical light fields, the development of optical traps within microfluidic environments, and the exploration of novel laser techniques for cell biology and medicine.  The group is headed by Kishan Dholakia, and consists of an international mixture of multi-disciplinary research staff and PhD students.  The multi-disciplinary nature of our work is best highlighted by our integral involvement in the University of St Andrews Biophotonics Collaboration.

Our research is presently funded by a number of sources, including the UK EPSRC, Cancer Research UK, the NERC, the European Union Framework 7 programme and the Royal Society.

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Measured gas viscosity of air, carbon dioxide and argon.   [Y. Arita et. al., "Picoliter rheology of gaseous media using a rotating optically trapped birefringent microparticle," Anal. Chem. (2011).]	Optical manipulation of 16 polystyrene micro-particles each of 3µm in diameter. Both the trapping beams (output modes) and the white-light illumination are delivered by the multimode optical fibre (Featured in opticsinfobase as image of the week in September 2011) [T. Cizmár, and K. Dholakia, Opt. Express 19, 18871-18884 (2011).]

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