Related papers: Fundamental Limits of Optical Force and Torque
Photophoretic forces, several orders of magnitude stronger than radiation pressure, enable particle trapping at remarkably low optical intensities and have opened pathways to applications in aerosol science, free-space 3D volumetric…
The optical trapping and manipulation of small particles is an important tool for probing fluid properties at the microscale. In particular, microrheology exploits the manipulation and rotation of micron-scale particles to probe local…
Owing to the ubiquity and easy-to-shape property of optical intensity, the intensity gradient force of light has been most spectacularly exploited in optical manipulation of small particles. Manifesting the intensity gradient as an optical…
Light can exert radiation pressure on any object it encounters and that resulting optical force can be used to manipulate particles. It is commonly assumed that light should move a particle forward and indeed an incident plane wave with a…
Based on fundamental properties of light scattering by a particle we reveal the existence of the ultimate upper limit for the light absorption by any partial mode. First, we obtain this result for scattering of a plane wave by a symmetric…
Optical fields can induce forces between microscopic objects, thus giving rise to new structures of matter. We study theoretically these optical forces between two spheres, either isolated in water, or in presence of a flat dielectric…
Light-induced rotation of absorbing microscopic particles by transfer of angular momentum from light to the material raises the possibility of optically driven micromachines. The phenomenon has been observed using elliptically polarized…
Understanding how the structured incident light interacts with the inherent properties of the manipulated particle and governs the optical force/torque exerted is a cornerstone in the design of optical manipulation techniques, apart from…
Photons carry linear momentum, and spin angular momentum when circularly or elliptically polarized. During light-matter interaction, transfer of linear momentum leads to optical forces, while angular momentum transfer induces optical…
Counter-propagating light fields have the ability to create self-organized one-dimensional optically bound arrays of microscopic particles, where the light fields adapt to the particle locations and vice versa. We develop a theoretical…
In recent years there has been an explosive development of interest in the measurement of forces at the microscopic level, such as within living cells, as well as the properties of fluids and suspensions on this scale, using optically…
Absorption and scattering of electromagnetic waves by dielectric media are of fundamental importance in many branches of physics. In this Letter we analytically derived the ultimate upper limits for the absorbed and scattered powers by any…
Optically levitated particles are used in a wide range of experiments to explore both fundamental physics and to act as sensors to a variety of external forces. One field of particular interest that these particles can be used to…
Understanding the momentum of light when propagating through optical media is not only fundamental for studies as varied as classical electrodynamics and polaritonics in condensed matter physics, but also for important applications such as…
Angular momentum and torque are important principles for basic and applied physics on any spatial scales, for example, in elementary particles, cold gases, optical tweezers, quantum information technology, metamaterials, gyroscopes or…
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…
A recent study of the photonic coupling between metallic nanowires has revealed new degrees of freedom in the system. Unexpected spin torques were induced on dimers when illuminated with linearly polarized plane-waves. As near-field…
We present a detailed theoretical study of the recent proposal for selective nanomanipulation of nanometric particles above a substrate using near-field optical forces [Chaumet {\it et al.} Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 88}, 123601 (2002)].…
Using light to control the movement of nano-structured objects is a great challenge. This challenge involves fields like optical tweezing, Casimir forces, integrated optics, bio-physics, and many others. Photonic "robots" could have…
Photophoretic force due to the optically-induced thermal effect provides an effective way to manipulate the light-absorbing particles suspended in ambient gases. However, how this force temporally responds to the intensity modulation of the…