The escape of a particle from a driven harmonic potential to an attractive surface

Abstract

We investigate theoretically the dynamics of a colloidal particle, trapped by optical tweezers, which gradually approaches an attractive surface with a constant velocity until it escapes the trap and jumps to the surface. We find that the height of the energy barrier in such a colloid-surface system follows the scaling ΔE (z0 (t) -const)32 when the trap approaches the surface, z0 (t) being the trap surface distance. Using this scaling we derive equations for the probability density function of the jump lengths, for the velocity dependence of its mean and most probable values, and for the variance. These can be used to extract the parameters of the particle-surface interaction from experimental data. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.