Position control and optical manipulation for nanotechnology applications

During the last decade, great advances have been made concerning the construction and manipulation of nanostructures. As a consequence, nanometer stability and control of the sample position have became crucial points. For this purpose, we have built an optical microscope with high mechanic stability and we have implemented a feedback system in order to compensate thermal drifts. We demonstrate the system stability to be within one nanometer, with a control on the sample position of some micrometers, along the three spatial directions. The sample can be manipulated optically by means of a multiple optical tweezers setup and its displacements measured with a 3D position detector. We discuss and characterize the system properties thoroughly. We finally test the apparatus on a bio-molecular system constituted by a single myosin motor interacting with an actin filament. Copyright EDP Sciences/Società Italiana di Fisica/Springer-Verlag 2005