Related papers: Controlling dispersion forces between small partic…
Custom-designed colloidal particles in an optical tweezers act as light-mills in a fluid. In particular, aqueous suspensions of capped colloids, in which half of the surface is covered with metal layers, are investigated. Due to their…
Strong optical pulses at mid-infrared and terahertz frequencies have recently emerged as a powerful tool to manipulate and control the solid state and especially complex condensed matter systems with strongly correlated electrons. The…
Optical and optoelectronic techniques for micro- and nano-object manipulation are becoming essential tools in nano- and bio-technology. A remarkable optoelectronic technique that has experimented a strong development in the last few years…
Self-assembly of colloidal particles due to elastic interactions in nematic liquid crystals promises tunable composite materials and can be guided by exploiting surface functionalization, geometric shape and topology, though these means of…
We analyze the temporal response of the fluorescence light that is emitted from a dense gas of cold atoms driven by a laser. When the average interatomic distance is smaller than the wavelength of the photons scattered by the atoms, the…
Critical Casimir interactions represent a perfect example of bath-induced forces at mesoscales. These forces may have a relevant role in the living systems as well as a role in the design of nanomachines fueled by environmental…
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…
Colloidal dispersions composed of polymethylmetacrylate particles dispersed in a mixture of cyclohexylbromide and decalin find widespread use as model systems in optical microscopy experiments. While the system allows simultaneous density…
We present a numerical method for investigating the non-perturbative quantum mechanical interaction of light with atoms in two dimensions, without a basis expansion. This enables us to investigate intense laser-atom interactions with light…
Electrostatic forces between small groups of colloidal particles are measured using blinking optical tweezers. When the electrostatic screening length is significantly larger than the particle radius, forces are found to be non-pairwise…
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…
Optical tweezers can manipulate tiny particles. However, the distortion caused by the scattering medium restricts the applications of optical tweezers. Wavefront shaping techniques including the transmission matrix (TM) method are powerful…
We show how state-dependent optical potentials can be used to trap a pair of molecules in different internal states at a separation much smaller than the wavelength of the trapping light. This close spacing greatly enhances the…
The dynamic control of novel states of matter beyond thermodynamic equilibrium is a fundamental pursuit in condensed matter physics. Intense terahertz fields have enabled metal-insulator transitions, superconductivity, quantum paraelectric…
Light scattering techniques are widely used in many fields of condensed and sof t matter physics. Usually these methods are based on the study of the scattered light in the far field. Recently, a new family of near field detection schemes…
Since its invention by Arthur Ashkin and colleagues at Bell Labs in the 1970s, optical micromanipulation, also known as optical tweezers or laser tweezers, has evolved remarkably to become one of the most convenient and versatile tools for…
A mechanically compliant element can be set into motion by the interaction with light. In turn, this light-driven motion can give rise to ponderomotive correlations in the electromagnetic field. In optomechanical systems, cavities are often…
The mechanical action on matter of the electromagnetic field emitted by a fluctuating source is governed by its statistics. In particular, thermal sources and vacuum fluctuations exert on bodies those well-known Casimir (C) and Van der…
The local interaction of charges and light in organic solids is the basis of distinct and fundamental effects. We here observe, at the single molecule scale, how a focused laser beam can locally shift by hundreds-time their natural…
We use a general theory of the fluctuating electromagnetic field to calculate the friction force acting on a small neutral particle, e.g., a physisorbed molecule, or a nanoscale object with arbitrary dispersive and absorptive dielectric…