A breaking of symmetry involves an abrupt change in the set of microstates a system can
explore. This change has unavoidable thermodynamic implications: a shrinkage of the …

The cooling of the center of mass motion of optically trapped microspheres by feedback
stabilization is advancing rapidly, and cooling below several millikelvin is possible. Such a …

In this study, we report a systematic study of the response of a charged microparticle
confined in an optical trap and driven by electric fields. The particle is embedded in a polar …

Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) has been shown to be a suitable technique to obtain
thermal images of a wide variety of samples from semiconductors to biological material. In …

Optical trap** and manipulation have emerged as powerful tools to investigate single
microscopic objects in a controlled environment. Using the momentum carried by light …

The use of optical tweezers to study the behavior of microscopic systems driven out of
equilibrium has been extended in the last decades, as discussed in the previous chapters …

A symmetry breaking (SB) involves an abrupt change in the set of microstates that a system
can explore. This change has unavoidable thermodynamic implications. According to …

The relationship between dissipation and irreversibility is at the core of statistical mechanics
and thermodynamics [Cal85]. The first works on this relationship were done in linear …