Related papers: Optical manipulation with metamaterial structures

Electromagnetic waves carry energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum. When light (or other electromagnetic radiation) interacts with material media, both energy and momentum are usually exchanged. The force and torque experienced by…

Hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) are highly anisotropic optical materials that behave as metals or as dielectrics depending on the direction of propagation of light. They are becoming essential for a plethora of applications, ranging from…

The miniaturization of mechanical mechanisms is crucial to enable the development of compact, high-performance micromachines. However, the downscaling actuation of conventional gears and micromotors has remained limited by the inherent…

Using optical tweezers and a haptic device, microspheres having diameters ranging from 3 to 4 um (floating in a fluid solution) are manipulated in order to form patterns of coupled optical microresonators by assembling the spheres via…

Optical metamaterials capture the imagination with breathtaking promises of nanoscale resolution in imaging and invisibility cloaking. We demonstrate an approach to construct a metamaterial in which metallic nanorods, of dimension much…

Metamaterials represent one of the most vibrant fields of modern science and technology. They are generally dispersive structures in the direct and reciprocal space and time domains. Upon this consideration, I overview here a number of…

All light has structure, but only recently it has become possible to construct highly controllable and precise potentials so that most laboratories can harness light for their specific applications. In this chapter, we review the emerging…

In the recent past, optical tweezers incorporating a stratified medium have been exploited to generate complex translational and rotational dynamics in mesoscopic particles due to the coupling between the spin and orbital angular momentum…

Spatial tailoring of the material constitutive properties is a well-known strategy to mold the local flow of given observables in different physical domains. Coordinate-transformation-based methods (e.g., transformation optics) offer a…

We show that the optical properties of an oblique layered system with two kinds of isotropic materials can be described using the concept of transformation media as long as the thickness of the layers is much smaller than the wavelength.…

We describe the design of two types of metamaterials aimed at enhancing terahertz field pulses that can be used to control the magnetic state in condensed matter systems. The first structure is a so-called "dragonfly" antenna, able to…

During the past few years, metasurfaces have been used to demonstrate optical elements and systems with capabilities that surpass those of conventional diffractive optics. Here we review some of these recent developments with a focus on…

Optical tweezers use laser light to trap and move microscopic particles in space. Here we demonstrate a similar control over ultrashort light pulses, but in time. Our experiment involves temporal cavity solitons that are stored in a passive…

From the demonstration of saturable absorption by Vavilow and Levshin in 1926, and with invention of the laser, unavailability of strongly nonlinear materials was a key obstacle for developing optical signal processing, in particular in…

Layered two-dimensional (2D) materials have revolutionized how we approach light-matter interactions, offering unprecedented optical and electronic properties with the potential for vertical heterostructures and manipulation of spin-valley…

Volumes of sub-wavelength electromagnetic elements can act like homogeneous materials: metamaterials. In analogy, sheets of optical elements such as prisms can act ray-optically like homogeneous sheet materials. In this sense, such sheets…

Control of light by an external magnetic field is one of the important methods for modulation of its intensity and polarisation. Magneto-optical effects at the nanoscale are usually observed in magnetophotonic crystals, nanostructured…

We introduce a simple theoretical model that describes the interaction of light with optical metamaterials in terms of interfering optical plane waves. In this model, a metamaterial is considered to consist of planar arrays of densely…

Metasurfaces are planar structures that locally modify the polarization, phase, and amplitude of light in reflection or transmission, thus enabling lithographically patterned flat optical components with functionalities controlled by…

Structuring optical materials on a nanometer scale can lead to artificial effective media, or metamaterials, with strongly altered optical behavior. Metamaterials can provide a wide range of linear optical properties such as negative…