Optical tweezers has become a powerful and common tool for sensitive determination of electrostatic interactions between colloidal particles. Recently, two techniques, “blinking” tweezers and direct force measurements, have become increasingly prevalent in investigations of inter-particle potentials. The “blinking” tweezers method acquires physical statistics of particle trajectories to determine drift velocities, diffusion coefficients, and ultimately colloidal forces as a function of the center-center separation of two particles. Direct force measurements monitor the position of a particle relative to the center of an optical trap as the separation distance between two continuously trapped particles is gradually decreased. As the particles near each other, the displacement from the trap center for each particle increases proportional to the inter-particle force. Although commonly employed in the investigation of interactions of colloidal particles, there exists no direct comparison of these experimental methods in the literature. In this study, an experimental apparatus was developed capable of performing both methods and is used to quantify electrostatic potentials between particles in several particle/solvent systems. Comparisons are drawn between the experiments conducted using the two measurement techniques, theory, and existing literature. Forces are quantified on the femto-Newton scale and results agree well with literature values.

Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company for the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.