Transient trapping of two microparticles interacting with optical tweezers and cavitation bubbles

Abstract

In this work we show that two absorbing microbeads can briefly share the same optical trap while creating microscopic explosions. Optical forces pull the particles towards the waist of the trapping beam, once a particle reaches the vicinity of the waist, the surrounding liquid is superheated creating an explosion or cavitation bubble that pushes the particle away while lengthening or shortening the trajectories of the surrounding particles. Hence effectively coupling all the trajectories to each cavitation event. We find that when two microbeads reach the waist simultaneously within a distance of from the beam center in the transverse plane, a larger explosion might result in ejection from the trap. The measured maximum radial displacements due to cavitation are when the particles reach simultaneously with maximum bubble sizes , while for individual cases is and . We also measure the characteristic timescale of two particle coalescence which is a measure of the expected time that the particles can stay trapped near the waist. The measurements are fitted by a Poisson decaying exponential probability distribution. A simple one-dimensional model shows that the characteristic timescales for transient trapping of multiple absorbing particles decrease as more objects are added.