Computation of the radiation force exerted by the acoustic tweezers using pressure field measurements.

Abstract

Acoustic tweezers allow for manipulation of small objects like elastic spheres with a force generated by the radiation pressure which arises from the nonlinear interaction between the incident and scattered waves by the object. The accurate control of the object by acoustic tweezers requires the study of the components of the three-dimensional (3D) force. If the physical properties of the elastic sphere are known, then the 3D components of the force can be calculated thanks to a decomposition of the incident acoustic field in the spherical functions basis. This study proposes evaluating the expansion coefficients. Three methods are used and compared. The first one consists of measuring the acoustic field on a spherical surface centered on the theoretical position of the object and to calculate the spherical functions decomposition by Lebedev quadratures. The second method is based on the measurement of the acoustic field at random points in a spherical volume and on the resolution of the inverse problem by a sparse method called the orthogonal matching pursuit. In the third method, the incident beam is measured on a transverse plane, decomposed into a sum of plane waves, and then the expansion coefficients are calculated. The results of the three methods will be presented and compared.