English

Single-Beam Optical Conveyor Belt for Chiral Particles

Optics 2022-01-03 v3

Abstract

A different paradigm is proposed to selectively manipulate and transport small engineered chiral particles and discriminate different enantiomers using unstructured chiral light. It is theoretically shown that the response of a chiral metamaterial particle may be tailored to enable an optical conveyor belt operation with no optical traps, such that for a fixed incident light helicity the nanoparticle is either steadily pushed towards the direction of the photon flow or steadily pulled against the photon flow, independent of its position. Our findings create distinct opportunities for unconventional optical manipulations of tailored nanoparticles and may have applications in sorting racemic mixtures of artificial chiral molecules and in particle delivery.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.01525,
  title  = {Single-Beam Optical Conveyor Belt for Chiral Particles},
  author = {David E. Fernandes and Mário G. Silveirinha},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.01525},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

23 pages, 7 figures, preprint

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:53:45.647Z