When an infrared femtosecond laser pulse is focused in the vicinity of cells into a culture medium through an objective lens, a stress wave is generated at the laser focal point along with the generations of a shockwave and a cavitation bubble. A short packet of the stress wave affects the cells as an impulsive force. The impulsive force has a strong effect only at the vicinity of the laser focal point (a few tens of μm in diameter) when the pulse energy is tuned to be the threshold of the generation. We considered that this technique might be applicable as a driving force to manipulate and to measure biological cells. In this paper, the generation process of the impulsive force was explained and its applications for living animal and plant cells were introduced.
['Yoichiroh Hosokawa']
Fast force loading on biological cell driven by femtosecond laser and its applications