Related papers: Tailoring bistability in optical tweezers with vor…
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…
The dual-fiber optical trap, owing to its high sensitivity and facile miniaturization, holds significant actual application value in fields such as high-precision metrology of mechanical quantities and biological manipulation. The…
We systematically investigate the bistable behavior and squeezing property of the librational mode of a levitated nonspherical nanoparticle trapped by laser beams. By expanding the librational potential to the forth order of the librational…
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 report for the first time the theory of optical tweezers of spherical dielectric particles embedded in a chiral medium. We develop a partial-wave (Mie) expansion to calculate the optical force acting on a dielectric microsphere…
Optical tweezers are highly versatile laser traps for neutral microparticles, with fundamental applications in physics and in single molecule cell biology. Force measurements are performed by converting the stiffness response to…
Experimental observations suggest that there are differences between the behavior of particles optically trapped in air and trapped in a liquid phase. We present a modified version of Mie Debye Spherical Aberration theory to numerically…
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…
We demonstrate a new method for determining the radius of micron-sized particles trapped by a vortex laser beam. The technique is based on measuring the rotation experienced by the center of mass of a microsphere that is laterally displaced…
Particles trapped by optical tweezers, behaving as mechanical oscillators in an optomechanical system, have found tremendous applications in various disciplines and are still arousing research interest in frontier and fundamental physics.…
We explain and demonstrate a new method of force- and position-calibration for optical tweezers with back-focal-plane photo detection. The method combines power spectral measurements of thermal motion and the response to a sinusoidal motion…
When microspheres are illuminated by tightly focused vortex beams, they can be trapped in a non-equilibrium steady state where they orbit around the optical axis. By using the Mie-Debye theory for optical tweezers, we demonstrate that the…
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…
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…
Orbital optical trapping of a dielectric micro-particle in air was studied experimentally using a lensed, counter-propagating dual-beam trap, and by numerical simulations employing ray optics. The essential attributes of particle dynamics…
A nanofiber-based optical tweezer is demonstrated. Trapping is achieved by combining attractive near-field optical gradient forces with repulsive electrostatic forces. Silica-coated Fe$_2$O$_3$ nanospheres of 300 diameter are trapped as…
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…
Optical tweezers enable non-contact trapping of micro-scale objects using light. Despite their widespread use, it is currently not known how tightly it is possible to three-dimensionally trap micro-particles with a given photon budget.…
Near-field patterns of light provide a way to optically trap, deliver and sort single nanoscopic particles in a wide variety of applications in nanophotonics, microbiology and nanotechnology. Using rigorous electromagnetic theory, we…
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…