Related papers: Fine features of optical potential well induced 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…
Optical tweezers that utilize a highly focused, linearly polarized laser beam exhibit strong trap stiffness asymmetry, which originates from the anisotropic field distribution in the transverse plane. Based on the previous study of…
We present an optical system designed to capture and observe a single neutral atom in an optical dipole trap, created by focussing a laser beam using a large numerical aperture N.A.=0.5 aspheric lens. We experimentally evaluate the…
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,…
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…
The tremendous progress in light scattering engineering made it feasible to develop optical tweezers allowing capture, hold, and controllable displacement of submicronsize particles and biological structures. However, the momentum…
This work presents the first optical trapping experimental demonstration of micro-particles with Frozen Waves. Frozen Waves are an efficient method to model longitudinally the intensity of non-diffracting beams obtained by superposing…
Optical tweezers have become a powerful tool for measuring parameters of microscale and nanoscale local environments. Motion of particles within optical tweezer traps established itself as a probe for local viscosity, temperature as well as…
Current optical manipulation techniques rely on carefully engineered setups and samples. Although similar conditions are routinely met in research laboratories, it is still a challenge to manipulate microparticles when the environment is…
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…
Conical refraction occurs when a beam of light travels through an appropriately cut biaxial crystal. By focussing the conically refracted beam through a high numerical aperture microscope objective, conical refraction optical tweezers can…
Focused laser beams allow controlling mechanical motion of objects and can serve as a tool for assembling complex micro and nano structures in space. While in a vast majority of cases small particles experience attractive gradient forces…
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…
Optical forces acting on nano-sized particles are typically too small to be useful for particle manipulation. We theoretically and numerically demonstrate a mechanism that can significantly enhance the optical force acting on a small…
Optical lattices serve as fundamental building blocks for atomic quantum technology. However, the scale and resolution of these lattices are diffraction-limited to the light wavelength. In conventional lattices, achieving tight confinement…
Optically levitated nanoparticles in vacuum provide a highly sensitive platform for probing weak light-matter interactions. In this work, we present an interference-based method to amplify the optical force exerted by a weak field on a…
As we read this text, our eyes dynamically adjust the focal length to keep the line image in focus on the retina. Similarly, in many optics applications the focal length must be dynamically tunable. In the quest for compactness and…
The size of particles which can be trapped in optical tweezers ranges from tens of nanometres to tens of micrometres. This size regime also includes large single molecules. Here we present experiments demonstrating that optical tweezers can…
Optical binding allows creation of mechanically stable nanoparticle configurations owing to formation of self-consistent optical trapping potentials. While the classical diffraction limit prevents achieving deeply subwavelength…
Arrays of optical tweezers form the backbone of neutral atoms analog and digital quantum processors. However, the inter-trap distance remains generally much larger than the size of the tweezers to avoid interference-induced trap…