Single focused-beam acoustical tweezers

Oral presentation; International audience; Single beam acoustical tweezers have seen rapid development for their potential applications in vitro and in vivo in different fields such as acoustofluidics, microrobotics, precision medicine, and so on. The first single beam acoustical tweezers used a focused beam in analogy with optical tweezers [Lee et al., Appl. Phys. Lett., 95, 073701 (2009)]. However, they only succeeded to trap light particles with negative acoustic contrast factor in two dimensions. In this talk, we revisit theoretically the capabilities of acoustical tweezers based on focused beams and demonstrate that they can trap (i) some specific light elastic particles and droplets in three dimensions in and beyond the Rayleigh regime, (ii) dense particles (with positive acoustic contrast factor) in two dimensions near the resonance frequencies, and (iii) lipid cells in three dimensions. Some preliminary experimental results will be presented.