Related papers: Optical pulling using topologically protected one-…
Trapping and manipulation of particles using laser beams has become an important tool in diverse fields of research. In recent years, particular interest is given to the problem of conveying optically trapped particles over extended…
Manipulating fluids by light at the nanoscale has been a long-sought-after goal for lab-on-a-chip applications. Plasmonic heating has been demonstrated to control microfluidic dynamics due to the enhanced and confined light absorption from…
Transformation optics (TO) is a new method to design metamaterials that can manipulate electromagnetic fields. Inspired by the traditional TO techniques which is mostly based on the solid metamaterials with a limited range of tunability, a…
Research into the orbital angular momentum carried by helical wave-fronts has been dominated by the fields of electromagnetism and acoustics, owing to its practical utility in sensing, communication and tweezing. Despite the huge research…
Artificial soft matter systems have appeared as important tools to harness mechanical motion for microscale manipulation. Typically, this motion is driven either by the external fields or by mutual interaction between the colloids. In the…
The robust transport of edge modes is perhaps the most useful property of topological materials. The existence of edge modes is guaranteed by the bulk-edge correspondence, which states that the number of topological edge modes is determined…
Optically coupled nanoparticles suffer the action of multiple electromagnetic forces when they are illuminated by light. In general, two kinds of forces are commonly assumed: binding forces that make them attract/repel each other and…
We derive the trapping energy of a colloidal particle at a liquid interface with contact angle h and principal curvatures c1 and c2. The boundary conditions at the particle surface are significantly simplified by introducing the shift e of…
Optical approaches for wavefront shaping traditionally rely on phase modulation through holographic techniques. Shaping the phase determines a wave's diffraction and hence its intensity distribution in space. We instead show that shaping…
Metamaterials, which are materials engineered to possess novel optical properties, have been increasingly studied. The ability to fabricate metamaterials has sparked an interest in determining possible applications. We investigate using a…
Topological protection in photonics offers new prospects for guiding and manipulating classical and quantum information. The mechanism of spin-orbit coupling promises the emergence of edge states that are helical; exhibiting unidirectional…
We report for the first time the theory of optical tweezers of spherical dielectric particles embedded in a chiral medium. We develop a partial-wave (Mie) expansion to calculate the optical force acting on a dielectric microsphere…
Propagated acoustic waves, which generate radiation pressure, exert a non-contact force on a remote object. By suitably designing the wave field, remote tweezers are produced that stably levitate particles in the air without any mechanical…
The spin angular momentum in an elliptically polarized beam of light plays several noteworthy roles in optical traps. It contributes to the linear momentum density in a non-uniform beam, and thus to the radiation pressure exerted on…
Optical force and torque provide unprecedented control on the spatial motion of small particles. A valid scientific question, that has many practical implications, concerns the existence of fundamental upper bounds for the achievable force…
Recent studies have shown that non-equilibrium optical systems under static electric fields offer a pathway to realize chiral gain, where the non-Hermitian response of a material is controlled by the spin angular momentum of the wave. In…
A different paradigm is proposed to selectively manipulate and transport small engineered chiral particles and discriminate different enantiomers using unstructured chiral light. It is theoretically shown that the response of a chiral…
Optical transport networks for active absorbing microparticles are made with holographic optical tweezers. The particles are powered by the optical potentials that make the network and transport themselves via random vapor propelled hops to…
Light forces induced by scattering and absorption in elastic dielectrics lead to local density modulations and deformations. These perturbations in turn modify light propagation in the medium and generate an intricate nonlinear response. We…
Radiation pressure forces in a focussed laser beam can be used to trap microscopic absorbing particles against a substrate. Calculations based on momentum transfer considerations show that stable trapping occurs before the beam waist, and…