Philip Jones is Reader in Physics at University College London where he leads the Optical Tweezers research group. Onofrio Maragò is Researcher at the Istituto per i Processi Chimico-Fisici (CNR-IPCF) in Messina, Italy, where he leads the Optical Trapping research group. Giovanni Volpe is Assistant Professor at Bilkent University where he is head of the Soft Matter Lab.

• 1. Introduction; Part I. Theory: 2. Ray optics; 3. Dipole approximation; 4. Optical beams and focusing; 5. Electromagnetic theory; 6. Computational methods; 7. Brownian motion; Part II. Practice: 8. Building an optical tweezers; 9. Data acquisition and optical tweezers calibration; 10. Photonic force microscope; 11. Wavefront engineering and holographic optical tweezers; 12. Advanced techniques; Part III. Applications: 13. Single molecule biophysics; 14. Cell biology; 15. Spectroscopy; 16. Optofluidics and lab on a chip; 17. Colloid science; 18. Microchemistry; 19. Aerosol science; 20. Statistical physics; 21. Nanothermodynamics; 22. Plasmonics; 23. Nanostructures; 24. Laser cooling and trapping of atoms; 25. Towards the quantum regime at the mesoscale; Index.

'Given the vast breadth of the subject, the title of the book may sound ambitious, yet the result is compelling. The authors are recognized experts in the field and have succeeded in combining a detailed textbook and a comprehensive encyclopedia of optical tweezers in one volume. The book is written at a high professional level and can serve as the basis of a graduate lecture course. The numerous exercises and problems of varying complexity included in Parts I and II will undoubtedly prove to be very instructive, while choosing specific applications from the great selection in Part III can help the instructor tailor the lecture course to the needs of a particular research field. The book also serves as a friendly user guide to a public-domain MatLab software toolbox available at www.opticaltweezers.org and called the Optical Tweezers Software (OTS).' Michael I. Mishchenko, Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer