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The manipulation of small objects with light has become an indispensable tool in many areas of research ranging from physics to biology and medicine. Here we demonstrate how to implement micro-manipulation at the optimal level of efficiency…
Optical trapping, where microscopic particles are trapped and manipulated by light is a powerful and widespread technique, with the single-beam gradient trap (also known as optical tweezers) in use for a large number of biological and other…
A photon carries a momentum of, so one may anticipate light to "push" on any object standing in its path via the scattering force. In the absence of intensity gradient, using a light beam to pull a particle backwards is counter intuitive.…
It has been known for a century that electromagnetic fields can transport not only energy and linear momentum but also angular momentum. However, it was not until twenty years ago, with the discovery in laser optics of experimental…
Robotic manipulation of deformable objects remains a challenging task. One such task is folding a garment autonomously. Given start and end folding positions, what is an optimal trajectory to move the robotic arm to fold a garment? Certain…
We consider ponderomotive forces acting on small particles in propagating wave packets (pulses). Specifically, we analyze simple point particles as well as composite dipole and dumbbell particles in the fields of forward-propagating…
A strongly focused laser beam can be used to trap, manipulate and exert torque on a microparticle. The torque is the result of transfer of angular momentum by scattering of the laser beam. The laser could be used to drive a rotor, impeller,…
Twisted light fields carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) provide powerful capabilities for applications in optical communications, microscopy, quantum optics and microparticle rotation. Here we introduce and experimentally validate a…
In the framework of a one-dimensional model with a tightly localized self-attractive nonlinearity, we study the formation and transfer (dragging) of a trapped mode by "nonlinear tweezers", as well as the scattering of coherent linear wave…
Recent advances in the field of structured waves have resulted in sophisticated coherent wavefront shaping schemes that provide unprecedented control of waves in various complex settings. These techniques exploit multiple scattering events…
Optically-levitated nanoparticles in vacuum offer a pristine platform for high-quality mechanical oscillators, enabling a wide range of precision measurements and quantum technologies. A key performance metric in such systems is the…
Wavefront shaping is a technique to study and control light transport inside scattering media. Wavefront shaping is considered to be applicable to any complex material, yet in most previous studies, the only sample geometries that are…
Acoustic trapping uses forces exerted by sound waves to transport small objects along specified trajectories in three dimensions. The structure of the acoustic force landscape is governed by the amplitude and phase profiles of the sound's…
A theory for obtaining waveform for the effective entrainment of a weakly forced oscillator is presented. Phase model analysis is combined with calculus of variation to derive a waveform with which entrainment of an oscillator is achieved…
We consider the following geometric optics problem: Construct a system of two reflectors which transforms a spherical wavefront generated by a point source into a beam of parallel rays. This beam has a prescribed intensity distribution. We…
Acoustic meta-atoms serve as the building blocks of metamaterials, with linear properties designed to achieve functions such as beam steering, cloaking and focusing. They have also been used to shape the characteristics of incident acoustic…
The mechanical action of various kinds of waves has been recognized for several centuries. The first tide of scientific interest in wave-induced forces and torques emerged at the turn of the 20th century, with the development of wave…
Orbital angular momentum (OAM) has aroused a widespread interest in many fields, especially in telecommunications due to its potential for unleashing new capacity in the severely congested spectrum of commercial communication systems. Beams…
In previous work, we have argued that measurement using a radar can be viewed as taking the expected value of an operator. The operator usually represents some aspect of the characteristics of the object being tracked (such as Doppler,…
Searches for gravitational wave signals which do not have a precise model describing the shape of their waveforms are often performed using power detectors based on a quadratic form of the data. A new, optimal method of generalizing these…