Related papers: Manipulation of a Micro-object Using Topological H…

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…

Fast and programmable transport of liquid droplets on a solid substrate is desirable in microfluidic, thermal, biomedical, and energy devices. Past research has focused on designing substrates with asymmetric structures or gradient…

Beams of light with helical wavefronts can be focused into ring-like optical traps known as optical vortices. The orbital angular momentum carried by photons in helical modes can be transferred to trapped mesoscopic objects and thereby…

Optical manipulation has attracted remarkable interest owing to its versatile and non-invasive nature. However, conventional optical trapping remains inefficient for the nanoscopic world. The emergence of plasmonics in recent years has…

Surfaces covered with layers of ultrathin nanoantenna structures, so-called metasurfaces, have recently been proven capable of completely controlling phase of light. Metalenses have emerged from the advance in the development of…

Since the pioneering work of Arthur Ashkin, optical tweezers have become an indispensable tool for contactless manipulation of micro- and nanoparticles. Nowadays optical tweezers are employed in a myriad of applications demonstrating the…

The propulsion of a liquid indium-tin micro-droplet by nanosecond-pulse laser impact is experimentally investigated. We capture the physics of the droplet propulsion in a scaling law that accurately describes the plasma-imparted momentum…

The transport of small quantities of liquid on a solid surface is inhibited by the resistance to motion caused by the contact between the liquid and the solid. To overcome such resistance, motion can be externally driven through gradients…

It has been recently reported that elastic waves induced by nanosecond light pulses can be used to drive nano-motion of micro-objects on frictional solid interfaces, a challenging task for traditional techniques using tiny optical force. In…

We propose a robotic manipulation system that can pivot objects on a surface using vision, wrist force and tactile sensing. We aim to control the rotation of an object around the grip point of a parallel gripper by allowing rotational slip,…

Moving nanoparticles/atoms to study the nearfield interaction between them is one of the many approaches to explore the optical and electrical properties of these assemblies. Traditional approach included the self assembly by spinning or…

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel optical method for trapping and cooling dielectric nanospheres at (sub)-micron distances from a reflective metallic surface. By translating a tilted mirror towards the focus of a single-beam…

Using light to manipulate small particles is a powerful tool with numerous practical applications across biophysics and nanotechnology. This experimental technique has achieved significant performance gains by employing shaped wavefronts,…

To understand the non-equilibrium relaxation dynamics of a liquid droplet on a switchable substrate the interplay of different length- and time-scales needs to be understood. We present a method to map the microscopic information, resulting…

Optical tweezers exploit light--matter interactions to trap particles ranging from single atoms to micrometer-sized eukaryotic cells. For this reason, optical tweezers are a ubiquitous tool in physics, biology, and nanotechnology. Recently,…

To date, optical manipulation techniques for aqueous dispersions have been developed that deposit and/or transport nanoparticles not only for fundamental studies of colloidal dynamics, but also for either creating photonic devices or…

Droplet deposition onto a hydrophobic surface is studied experimentally and numerically. A wide range of droplet sizes can result from the same syringe, depending strongly on the needle retraction speed. Three regimes are identified…

Waves impart momentum and exert force on obstacles in their path. The transfer of wave momentum is a fundamental mechanism for contactless manipulation, yet the rules of conventional scattering intrinsically limit the radiation force based…

We report an experimental implementation of dynamical holographic tweezers for single trapped atoms. The tweezers are realized with dynamical phase holograms displayed on the liquid crystal spatial light modulator. We experimentally…

Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…