Please be informed of MBI Weekly Meeting Seminar this Friday,25 November as follows:

Time: 9:30am
Venue: T-Lab Level 5 Seminar Room
Presenter: Felix Margadant
Talk Title: Large Area Fast Pillar Tracking

Abstract
Pillar substrates that isolate forces to a locally limited deflection of one or few pillars have been a method of choice for generating medium-density resolution force maps for over a decade. Unlike localization microscopy and gel substrates it provides regular sampling intervals that allow for establishing Nyquist limits of the observations and a complete and consistent overview of the total forces involved.

From Benoit’s early observation that the pillars can be manufactured at an accuracy far better than the optical resolution limit, we derived the methods for absolute force measurements without the need of a reference and without external calibration.  More recently however, the better-than-optical quality started to haunt our system: for large fields of observation, the optical aberrations – no matter how small – begin to dominate the accuracy limit and lower it to unacceptable levels.  This talk is an overview of the ad-hoc and systematic solutions to control and counter this problem and an outlook at the chances of preserving a calibration-free system.”