Related papers: Trapping microparticles in a structured dark focus
Trapping of microspheres with a single focused laser beam is usually limited to materials with relative refractive indexes slightly larger than one. We show that directional light scattering can be employed to optically trap high-index…
Since their invention in the 1980s [1], optical tweezers have found a wide range of applications, from biophotonics and mechanobiology to microscopy and optomechanics [2, 3, 4, 5]. Simulations of the motion of microscopic particles held by…
Selective single beam tweezers open tremendous perspectives in microfluidics and microbiology for the micromanipulation, assembly and mechanical properties testing of microparticles, cells and microorganisms. In optics, single beam optical…
Precise control of particle positioning is desirable in many optical propulsion and sorting applications. Here, we develop an integrated platform for particle manipulation consisting of a combined optical nanofibre and optical tweezers…
Trapping of single ultracold atoms is an important tool for applications ranging from quantum computation and communication to sensing. However, most experimental setups, while very precise and versatile, can only be operated in specialized…
Particles that can be trapped in optical tweezers range from tens of microns down to tens of nanometres in size. Interestingly, this size range includes large macromolecules. We show experimentally, in agreement with theoretical…
The ability of metallic nanostructures to confine light at the sub-wavelength scale enables new perspectives and opportunities in the field of nanotechnology. Making use of this unique advantage, nano-optical trapping techniques have been…
We show that the optical force field in optical tweezers with elliptically polarized beams has the opposite handedness for a wide range of particle sizes and for the most common configurations. Our method is based on the direct observation…
We demonstrate and characterize the transfer of a levitating silica nanosphere between two optical tweezers, at low pressure. Both optical traps are mounted on the heads of optical fibers and placed on translation stages in vacuum chambers.…
Standard optical tweezers rely on optical forces that arise when a focused laser beam interacts with a microscopic particle: scattering forces, which push the particle along the beam direction, and gradient forces, which attract it towards…
Optical trapping is a well_established, decades old technology with applications in several fields of research. The most common scenario deals with particles that tend to be centered on the brightest part of the optical trap. Consequently,…
Optical tweezers have become essential tools to manipulate atoms or molecules at a single particle level. However, using standard diffracted-limited optical systems, the transverse size of the trap is lower bounded by the optical…
Plasmonic optical tweezers are a ubiquitous tool for the precise manipulation of nanoparticles and biomolecules at low photon flux, while femtosecond-laser optical tweezers can probe the nonlinear optical properties of the trapped species…
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,…
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…
An original optical tweezers using one or two chemically etched fiber nano-tips is developed. We demonstrate optical trapping of 1 micrometer polystyrene spheres at optical powers down to 2 mW. Harmonic trap potentials were found in the…
Dynamic control of compact chip-scale contactless manipulation of particles for bioscience applications remains a challenging endeavor, which is restrained by the balance between trapping efficiency and scalable apparatus. Metasurfaces…
Non-invasive and ultra-accurate optical manipulation of nanometer objects has recently gained a growing interest as a powerful enabling tool in nanotechnology and biophysics. In this context, Self-Induced Back-Action (SIBA) trapping in…
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…
Holographic optical tweezers use computer-generated holograms to create arbitrary three-dimensional configurations of single-beam optical traps useful for capturing, moving and transforming mesoscopic objects. Through a combination of…