Integration of photothermal response with optical tweezers for accurate extraction of thermal diffusivity of micro-particle

Photothermal Response (PTR) is a non-invasive method for real-time monitoring of biological processes. Accurate extraction of thermal parameters from the PTR results of a coalition of targets is difficult as the PTR signal is shape and size dependent. We propose optical tweezers to isolate a single particle from a group and perform PTR. The proposed technique is applied to red polystyrene micro-particles and the thermal diffusivity extracted is very much comparable to the standard values.