Nobel Prize Overview Colloquium: Light as a Mechanical Tool in the Bio-Medical Field - Optical Tweezers and Chirped Light

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was given to innovations in laser optics and how they can be applied in the bio-medical field.

The prize was split between two innovations that, at first sight, have little in common: optical tweezers and chirped-pulse amplification. There is, nonetheless, a deeper connection: besides both being powerful tools in bio-medical applications, they also share the use of light as a tool in a rather mechanical sense.

When speaking of light as a tool, one would first think of imaging or spectroscopy. However, optical tweezers can directly move and manipulate cells and other small objects without damaging them, as a mechanical tweezer might do. Chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) permits the generation of very intense, ultrashort pulses of light that can cut or machine materials without heating the regions immediately next to the cut. Furthermore, the cut can happen inside a transparent material without the need for an access canal, as in the case of a mechanical knife.

Both parts of the prize have connections to other fields as well. Optical tweezers are related to optical dipole traps for which the Nobel Prize was given in 1997, and CPA is but part of the wider field of phase-space shaping of light to match the requirements of an application, such as coherent control in chemistry, plasma physics, particle accelerators, etc.