Fundamental Tests of Physics with Optically Trapped Microspheres

Tongcang Li received his Ph.D in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011, where he received the Outstanding Dissertation in Physics award by the Department of Physics. He is currently in the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Previous positions include Graduate Research Assistant in the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics and Department of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

• Introduction.- Physical Principle of Optical Tweezers.- Optical Trapping of Glass Microspheres in Air and Vacuum.- Measuring the Instantaneous Velocity of a Brownian Particle in Air.- Towards Measurement of the Instantaneous Velocity of a Brownian Particle in Water.- Millikelvin Cooling of an Optically Trapped Microsphere in Vacuum.- Towards Quantum Ground-State Cooling.- Appendix.