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Optical tweezers employing forces produced by light underpin important manipulation tools in many areas of applied and biological physics. Conventional optical tweezers are based on refractive optics, and they require excessive auxiliary…
Light and sound waves have the fascinating property that they can move objects through the transfer of linear or angular momentum. This ability has led to the development of optical and acoustic tweezers, with applications ranging from…
Magnetic fields break time-reversal symmetry, which is leveraged in many settings to enable the nonreciprocal behavior of light. This is the core physics of circulators and other elements used in a variety of microwave and optical settings.…
Machines enabled the Industrial Revolution and are central to modern technological progress: A machine's parts transmit forces, motion, and energy to one another in a predetermined manner. Today's engineering frontier, building artificial…
The so-called "flat optics" that shapes the phase of an incident wave in free space through subwavelength structures has a venerable history. In that domain, achieving high efficiency at large deflection angles requires a low absorption…
Multilayer metasurfaces (MLMs) represent a versatile type of three-dimensional optical metamaterials that could enable ultra-thin and multi-functional photonic components. Herein we demonstrate an approach to readily fabricate MLMs…
Historically, the observation of half-spin particles was one of the most surprising features of quantum mechanics. They are often described as "objects that do not come back to their initial state after one turn but do after two turns".…
We introduce a new approach to build microscopic engines on the atomic scale that move translationally or rotationally and can perform useful functions such as pulling of a cargo. Characteristic of these engines is the possibility to…
Light forces can be harnessed to levitate mesoscopic objects and cool them down towards their motional quantum ground state. Significant roadblocks on the way to scale up levitation from a single to multiple particles in close proximity are…
Lightsails are a highly promising spacecraft concept that has attracted interest in recent years due to its potential to travel at near-relativistic speeds. Such speeds, which current conventional crafts cannot reach, offer tantalizing…
We describe colloidal Janus particles with metallic and dielectric faces that swim vigorously when illuminated by defocused optical tweezers without consuming any chemical fuel. Rather than wandering randomly, these optically-activated…
Many different robots have been designed and built to work under water. In many cases, researchers have chosen to use bio-inspired platforms. In most cases, the main goal of the fish inspired robots has been set to autonomously swim and…
This thesis describes experimental work on the use of wavefront shaping to steer light through strongly scattering materials. We find that scattering does not irreversibly scramble the incident wave. By shaping the incident wavefront, we…
Super-resolution imaging using sub-diffraction field localization by micron sized transparent beads (microspheres) was recently demonstrated [1]. Practical applications in microscopy require control over the positioning of the microspheres.…
A mechanism is suggested for creating well-collimated beams of neutral spin-polarized particles by means of magnetic fields. This mechanism can be used in atom lasers for the formation of directed coherent beams of atoms. The directed…
We experimentally demonstrate unidirectional light transmission through two-layer nanostructured materials considering that the horizontal-to-vertical-polarization conversion efficiency in the forward direction and the…
The recently proposed optical elements containing semitransparent wavelike films embedded into the transparent material are investigated. Such optical elements do not distort a wave transmitted through them. Novel optical elements can be…
Object tracking is an important step in robotics and reautonomous driving pipelines, which has to generalize to previously unseen and complex objects. Existing high-performing methods often rely on pre-captured object views to build…
We apply laser light to induce the asymmetric heating of Janus colloids adsorbed at water-oil interfaces and realize active micrometric "Marangoni surfers". The coupling of temperature and surfactant concentration gradients generates…
Flexible transparent electrodes, encompassing the combination of optical transparency and electrical conductivity, empower numerous optoelectronic applications. While the main efforts nowadays concentrate on developing wire meshes and…