Related papers: Transition of a particle between adjacent optical …

Two-body scattering of neutral particles in a trap is studied theoretically. The control of the initial state is realized by using optical traps. The collisions inside the trap occur repeatedly; thereby the effect of interaction can be…

Single atoms are interesting candidates for studying quantum optics and quantum information processing. Recently, trapping and manipulation of single atoms using tight optical dipole traps have generated considerable interest. Here we…

Since their invention in the 1980s [1], optical tweezers have found a wide range of applications, from biophotonics and mechanobiology to microscopy and optomechanics [2, 3, 4, 5]. Simulations of the motion of microscopic particles held by…

This work presents the first optical trapping experimental demonstration of micro-particles with Frozen Waves. Frozen Waves are an efficient method to model longitudinally the intensity of non-diffracting beams obtained by superposing…

Viscously damped particles driven past an evenly spaced array of potential energy wells or barriers may become kinetically locked in to the array, or else may escape from the array. The transition between locked-in and free-running states…

Optical tweezers have found widespread application in many fields, from physics to biology. Here, we explain in detail how optical forces and torques can be described within the geometrical optics approximation and we show that this…

Optical trapping is a widely used technique, with many important applications in biology and metrology. Complete modelling of trapping requires calculation of optical forces, primarily a scattering problem, and non-optical forces. The…

We consider the motion of a harmonically trapped overdamped particle, which is submitted to a self-phoretic force, that is proportional to the gradient of a diffusive field for which the particle itself is the source. In agreement with…

Optical trapping, also known as optical tweezing or optical levitation, is a technique that uses highly focused laser beams to manipulate micro- and nanoscopic particles. In optical traps driven by high-energy pulses, material non-linearity…

We explain and demonstrate a new method of force- and position-calibration for optical tweezers with back-focal-plane photo detection. The method combines power spectral measurements of thermal motion and the response to a sinusoidal motion…

Many processes in chemistry, physics, and biology involve rare events in which the system escapes from a metastable state by surmounting an activation barrier. Examples range from chemical reactions, protein folding, and nucleation events…

When subjected to monochromatic incident light a nanoparticle will emit light which then interferes with the incident beam. With sufficient contrast and sufficiently close to the particle this interference pattern may be recorded with a…

We measure interaction forces between pairs of charged PMMA colloidal particles suspended in a relatively low-polar medium (5 $\lesssim \epsilon \lesssim$ 8) directly from the deviations of particle positions inside two time-shared optical…

We recently demonstrated that strings of trapped atoms inside a standing wave optical dipole trap can be rearranged using optical tweezers [Y. Miroshnychenko et al., Nature, in press (2006)]. This technique allows us to actively set the…

The dynamics of an optically trapped particle are often determined by measuring intensity shifts of the back-scattered light from the particle using position sensitive detectors. We present a technique which measures the phase of the…

An extended interference pattern close to surface may result in both a transmissive or evanescent surface fields for large area manipulation of trapped particles. The affinity of differing particle sizes to a moving standing wave light…

Forces on a nanoparticle in an optical trap are analysed. Brownian motion is found to be one of the major challenges to trap a nanoparticle. Accordingly, suitable spatial electric field distribution of laser beam is suggested to enhance the…

Optical trapping describes the interaction between light and matter to manipulate micro-objects through momentum transfer. In the case of 3D trapping with a single beam, this is termed optical tweezers. Optical tweezers are a powerful and…

We introduce a method for analyzing the physical properties of nanoparticles in fluids via the competition between viscous drag and optical forces. By flowing particles through a microfluidic device containing an optical microcavity which…

It is common to introduce optical tweezers using either geometric optics for large particles or the Rayleigh approximation for very small particles. These approaches are successful at conveying the key ideas behind optical tweezers in their…