Schematic illustration of the characterization on a picospring array by an optical trap. The characterization structure has a cantilever picospring and two short bars at the free end, forming a holder for an action microbead pulled by the optical trap to stably deform the picospring. The load is applied parallel to the cross-section of the cantilever by the trapped microbead. When the microbead is moved at a negligible velocity to deform the cantilever picospring, the elastic force of the cantilever picospring approximately equals the trapping force provided by the optical trap. Rigid parts are coloured grey and flexible picosprings are coloured blue in the right panel. We use 25 mW to fabricate all nominally rigid parts.
