Nonequilibrium heat dissipation as a probe for detecting wavefront distortion in microscopy

Although an optical vortex (OV) is a promising means for driving cyclic Brownian dynamics of a small particle, the OV-driven dynamics cannot avoid producing additional nonequilibrium heat dissipation of a few tens of <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><a:mrow><a:msub><a:mi>k</a:mi><a:mtext>B</a:mtext></a:msub><a:mi>T</a:mi></a:mrow></a:math> per cycle due to distortion of a light wavefront. We propose an adaptive wavefront-optimization concept, where minor wavefront distortion in microscopy can be probed by the additional heat dissipation itself. As a result, the additional heat dissipation was suppressed to <b:math xmlns:b="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><b:mrow><b:mo>&lt;</b:mo><b:mn>0.6</b:mn><b:mspace width="0.16em"/><b:msub><b:mi>k</b:mi><b:mtext>B</b:mtext></b:msub><b:mi>T</b:mi></b:mrow></b:math>, which makes OVs applicable to examining small nonequilibrium changes in thermodynamic systems. The present approach is expected to become an experimental standard in the nonequilibrium physics field. Published by the American Physical Society 2024