Patent ID: 8502132

Claim:
A method for manipulation of a plurality of objects comprising the steps of: providing an optical train including an objective lens having a normal focal plane and the optical train including a focal volume and further providing a source of a laser beam and passing the laser beam through a diffractive optical element to produce a diffracted laser beam and an undiffracted laser beam, thereby producing holographic optical traps; providing a shaping source in the optical train and generating a phase-based mode of the diffracted laser beam to enable different transformation operations to be applied to the diffracted laser beam independently for each of the holographic optical traps, thereby resulting in being able to generate general third-dimensional configurations of different types of the holographic optical traps; applying the shaping source to create modified holographic optical traps in an potential energy landscape with the modified optical traps being returned to the focal volume while the undiffracted laser beam is focused upstream of the objective lens normal focal plane, thereby ensuring that the undiffracted beam lacks both the intensity and the gradients needed to influence the sample; applying the holographic optical traps to a plurality of objects, thereby trapping at least a portion of the plurality of objects in the holographic optical traps spatially moving the holographic optical traps to manipulate the plurality of objects; and extinguishing the holographic optical traps, thereby causing the plurality of objects to move freely when the holographic optical traps are extinguished.