High-precision steering of multiple holographic optical traps

Locating and steering entire ensembles of microscopic objects has become extremely practical with the emergence of holographic optical tweezers. Application of this technology to single molecule experiments requires great accuracy in the spatial positioning of optical traps. This paper calculates the theoretical position resolution of a single holographic beam, predicting that sub-nanometer resolution is easily achieved. Experimental corroboration of the spatial resolution's inverse dependence on the hologram's number of pixels and phase levels is presented. To at least a nanometer range position resolution, multiple optical tweezers created by complex superposition holograms also follow the theoretical predictions for a single beam. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.