Calibration of optical tweezers based on acousto-optic deflector and field programmable gate array

Abstract

Accurate calibrations of stiffness and position are crucial to the quantitative measurement with optical tweezers. In this paper, we present a new calibration scheme for optical tweezers including stiffness and position calibrations. In our system, acousto-optic deflectors (AODs) are used as laser beam manipulating component. The AODs are controlled by a field programmable gate array (FPGA) connected to a computer using universal serial bus (USB) communication mode. Our results agree well with the present theory and other experimental results.