Deterministic thermal lanscape engineering at the microscale level by optical beam shaping with phase-only hologram

This project aims to develop an optofluidic platform to precisely control and generate arbitrary temperature gradients in space and time by manipulating the complex electric field of a laser beam incident upon an array of uniformly-distributed plasmonic nanoparticles. Specifically, a phase-only spatial light modulator (SLM) will be incorporated into a custom-built off-axis holographic microscope to shape the wavefront of a heating beam, and as a result achieve the desired temperature profile. This custom microscopy system enables not only the visualisation of temperature d An optical beam shaping system based on a phase-only spatial light modulator (SLM) was integrated into a holographic optical microscope developed to deliver heat locally and measure the resulting temperature in a label-free manner. The heat is delivered to the sample by focusing an IR laser onto a microscope slide functionalized with plasmonic resonant gold nano-particles. The IR beam profiles were tailored to impart specific geometries of the heat source and thus engineer the temperature profile by using the locally-excited plasmons as micro-scale heat sources. In this thesis, code was developed to calculate the heat source geometries required to form specific temperature gradients and subsequently generate the corresponding phasemask to apply to the SLM. The work also covers the introduction of the spatial light modulator into the existing optical system as well as the steps necessary to improve its performance.