Frontispiece: Tailoring the Properties of Optical Force Probes for Polymer Mechanochemistry

Optical force probes (OFPs) shine light on various unique mechanical behaviors of materials and allow the correlation of macroscopic mechanical properties with those of their molecular constituents. To accommodate the vastly diverse properties of polymers, OFPs must be tailored to account for the material requirements in energy (both light and force), in time, and in their spatially detectable resolution. Notable recent examples are highlighted and future challenges in this emergent field are identified in the Minireview by R. Göstl et al. on page 15889 ff.