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Manipulation of micro and nanoscale particles suspended in a fluidic medium is one among the defining goals of modern nanotechnology. Speckle tweezers (ST) by incorporating randomly distributed light fields have been used to apply detectable limits on the Brownian motion of micro-particles with refractive indices higher than their medium. Indeed, compared to periodic potentials, ST represents a wider possibility to be operated for such tasks. Here, we extend the usefulness of ST into low index micro-particles. Repelling of such particles by high intensity regions into lower intensity regions makes them to be locally confined, and the confinement can be tuned by changing the average grain intensity and size of the speckle patterns. Experiments on polystyrenes and liposomes validate the procedure. Moreover, we show that ST can be used to nano-particle (NP)-loaded liposomes. Interestingly, the different interactions of NP-loaded and empty liposomes with ST enables collective manipulation of their mixture using the same speckle pattern, which may be explained by inclusion of the photophoretic forces on NPs in NP-loaded liposomes. Our results on the different behavior between empty and non-empty vesicles may open a new window on controlling collective transportation of drug micro-containers along with its wide applications in soft matter., Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-cpx-10.1177_2167702620982576 for Proof of Concept for the Autobiographical Memory Flexibility (MemFlex) Intervention for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder by Ali Reza Moradi, Maryam Piltan, Mohammad Hasan Choobin, Parviz Azadfallah, Peter Watson, Tim Dalgleish and Caitlin Hitchcock in Clinical Psychological Science

Control experiment results and calculated of roughness parameters.

Most natural and engineered processes, such as biomolecular reactions, protein folding, and population dynamics, occur far from equilibrium and, therefore, cannot be treated within the framework of classical equilibrium thermodynamics. The Jarzynski equality holds the promise to calculate the free-energy difference between two states from the Boltzmann-weighted statistics of the irreversible work done along trajectories arbitrarily out of equilibrium. This equality is the subject of intense activity. However, the applicability of the Jarzynski equality to systems far from equilibrium such as living matter has not been investigated yet. We present an experimental test of the Jarzynski equality predictions on a paradigmatic physical model, i.e. a Brownian particle held in an optical potential, coupled either to a thermal bath or to an active bath. While in the thermal bath we find that the Jarzynski equality correctly retrieves the free-energy difference from nonequilibrium measurements, in the active bath the Jarzynski equality fails because of the presence of non-Boltzmann statistics. We corroborate our experimental findings with theoretical arguments and numerical simulations., Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures