I'm looking into commercially available optical tweezers for a project, and I'm wondering if anyone here has direct experience and opinions from using such a system.
Thorlabs company provides a commercial setup that uses 900+ nm laser, only thing you ought to need is assemble the kit referring to the manual and attach a computer.
I am using one of the commercial AOD optical tweezers from Arises for my research, and I must say that it is very user friendly. It is very easy to manipulate and operate with different traps at the same time (just by clicking on the mouse button) and at the end you don’t even have to know all the physic behind it. I would really recommend you to buy one of these optical tweezers.
I would join Josep in recommending OT systems from JPK, esp. for single molecule biophysics experiments. A good person to contact at JPK is Joost Van Mameren.
Boulder Nonlinear Systems now also sell holographic optical tweezers systems, designed at the Optics group in Glasgow University (including me, though I've now moved on). I think it's a very nice system, though of course I am hardly impartial! It can create many traps with an SLM and track multiple particles using a camera. It's also very open, you have full access to modify the software, and the hardware can be extended with standard ThorLabs parts. It's described in a paper here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4768303