One-dimensional jumping optical tweezers for optical stretching of bi-concave human red blood cells

We report the experimental demonstration of optical stretching of individual bio-concave human red blood cells (RBCs) with one-dimensional jumping optical tweezers. We trapped a RBC in isotonic buffer solution in a conventional stationary single-beam gradient-force optical trap and discretely scanned the trapping beam with an acousto-optic modulator such that the focal point of the trapping beam jumped back-and-forth between two fixed points. At the jumping frequency on the order of a 100 Hz and higher, and the jumping distance in the range of a few microns, the biconcave RBC was stably trapped and stretched. The elongation of the stretched RBC was measured as a function of the beam-scanning amplitude, and the experimental results were explained qualitatively by a theoretical model. (C) 2007 Optical Society of America.