Related papers: Creating optical centrifuge for rapid optical clea…
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…
Mode sorting is an essential function for optical systems exploiting the orthogonality of photonic orbital angular momentum mode space. The familiar log-polar optical transformation provides an efficient yet simple approach, however with…
The evanescent field of an optical nanofiber presents a versatile interface for the manipulation of micron-scale particles in dispersion. Here, we present a detailed study of the optical binding interactions of a pair of 3.13 $\mu$m SiO$_2$…
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…
Surface topography dictates the deterministic functionality of diffraction by a surface. In order to maximize the efficiency with which a diffractive optical component, such as a grating or a diffractive lens, directs light into a chosen…
Highly integrated active nanophotonics addressing both device footprint and operation speed demands is a key enabling technology for the next generation optical networks. Plasmonic systems have proven to be a serious contender to alleviate…
We demonstrate for the first time controlled patterning by inducing nucleation of material from a dense aqueous dispersion or solution in an optical tweezers. A hot spot is formed on a glass surface by the trapping laser due to which a…
Nanostructured dielectric metasurfaces offer unprecedented opportunities to control light-matter momentum exchange, and thereby the forces and torques that light can exert on matter. Here we introduce optical metasurfaces as components of…
Freeform optics aims to expand the toolkit of optical elements by allowing for more complex phase geometries beyond rotational symmetry. Complex, asymmetric curvatures are employed to enhance the performance of optical components while…
Photonic nanojets have been brought into attention ten years ago for potential application in ultramicroscopy, because of its sub-wavelength resolution that can enhance detection and interaction with matter. For these novel applications…
Optical tweezers are widely used as a highly sensitive tool to measure forces on micron-scale particles. One such application is the measurement of the electric charge of a particle, which can be done with high precision in liquids, air, or…
There has been a resurgence of interest in optical computing over the past decade, both in academia and in industry, with much of the excitement centered around special-purpose optical computers for neural-network processing. Optical…
Optical force can enable precise manipulations of small particles for various applications. It is well known that an isotropic lossless dielectric sphere is only subject to forward optical force under the illumination of an electromagnetic…
Ultrafast lasers have revolutionized material processing, opening a wealth of new applications in many areas of science. A recent technology that allows the cleaving of transparent materials via non-ablative processes is based on focusing…
Laser writing of materials is normally performed by the sequential scanning of a single focused beam across a sample. This process is time-consuming and it can severely limit the throughput of laser systems in key applications such as…
Light pressure effect has been discovered long ago and has been used as an optical method to manipulate microand nanoparticles. It is usually considered as a nonresonant effect determined by the transfer of the momentum of light. However,…
Prototype optical microscopes, built to pursue developments in advanced imaging techniques, need specific optomechanical constructions: preferably with high flexibility in the elements arrangement, easy access to the optical paths,…
Levitated optomechanical systems are rapidly becoming leading tools for precision sensing of forces and accelerations acting on particles in the femtogram to nanogram mass range. These systems enable a high level of control over the…
While conventional optical trapping techniques can trap objects with submicron dimensions, the underlying limits imposed by the diffraction of light generally restrict their use to larger or higher refractive index particles. As the index…
Optical and acoustical trapping has been established as a tool for holding and moving microscopic particles suspended in a liquid in a contact-free and non-invasive manner. Opposed to standard microscopic imaging where the probe is fixated,…