Optical trapping of an ellipsoidal particle — Geometrical Optics

This video shows the alignment process for a prolate ellipsoidal particle (glass, np = 1.50, long semiaxis 3 μm, short semiaxes 2 μm) in water (nm = 1.33) subject to Brownian motion and trapped in an optical tweezers. The power of the focused beam was set equal to 0.5mW.

Agnese Callegari, Mite Mijalkov, A. Burak Gököz, and Giovanni Volpe, “Computational toolbox for optical tweezers in geometrical optics,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 32, B11-B19 (2015).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/JOSAB.32.000B11