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Optical forces - studied since the earliest days of laser physics - continue to reveal rich dynamics and enable powerful tools for manipulation of objects on micro- and nanoscales, and even individual atoms. Lateral optical forces, which…

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…

Optomechanics is concerned with the use of light to control mechanical objects. As a field, it has been hugely successful in the production of precise and novel sensors, the development of low-dissipation nanomechanical devices, and the…

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…

Flat optics foresees a new era of ultra-compact optical devices, where metasurfaces serve as the foundation. Conventional designs of metasurfaces start with a certain structure as the prototype, followed by an extensive parametric sweep to…

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…

A scheme for fast, compact, and controllable acceleration of heavy particles in vacuum is proposed, in which two counterpropagating lasers with variable frequencies drive a beat-wave structure with variable phase velocity, thus allowing for…

Optical dipole-traps are used in various scientific fields, including classical optics, quantum optics and biophysics. Here, we propose and implement a dipole-trap for nanoparticles that is based on focusing from the full solid angle with a…

The ability to design passive structures that perform different operations on different electromagnetic fields is key to many technologies, from beam-steering to optical computing. While many techniques have been developed to optimise…

The use of a wire mesh facilitates creation of multiple optical traps for manipulation of small micron or sub-micron particles. Such an array of optical traps can be easily controlled. The trap that is formed in this manner is a continuous…

The dynamics of electrons in counter-propagating, circularly polarized laser beams are shown to exhibit attractors whose ability to trap particles depends on the ratio of the beam intensities and a single parameter describing radiation…

We investigate gain-assisted optical forces on dye-enriched silver nanoshell in the quasi-static limit by means of a theoretical/numerical approach. We demonstrate the onset of nonlinear optical trapping of these resonant nanostructures in…

We study optical wave manipulations through high-index dielectric metalattices in both diffractionless metasurface and diffractive metagrating regimes. It is shown that the collective lattice couplings can be employed to tune the excitation…

Photophoretic forces - which are of thermal origin - have defined an alternative route of optical trapping of absorbing microparticles in air. Here, we show that a single multi-mode fiber facilitates significantly more robust optical traps…

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…

Multipolar electromagnetic phenomena in sub-wavelength resonators are at the heart of metamaterial science and technology. In this letter, we demonstrate selective and enhanced coupling to specific multipole resonances via beam engineering.…

Gradient metasurfaces have been extensively applied in recent years for enabling an unprecedented control of light beam over thin optical components. However, these metasurfaces suffer from low efficiency when it comes to bending light with…

A key challenge in performing experiments with microparticles is controlling their adhesion to substrates. For example, levitation of a microparticle initially resting on a surface requires overcoming the surface adhesion forces to deliver…

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…

We theoretically investigate the emergence of lateral (recoil) forces acting on generic dipole-type emitters in the vicinity of a reciprocal translation-invariant substrate. Surprisingly, we find that for linearly-polarized electric dipoles…