Related papers: Nanofabrication beyond optical diffraction limit: …
Rotation in micro/nanoscale provides extensive applications in mechanical actuation$^{1, 2}$, cargo delivery$^{3, 4}$, and biomolecule manipulation$^{5, 6}$. Light can be used to induce a mechanical rotation remotely, instantly and…
The ability to create dynamic, tailored optical potentials has become important across fields ranging from biology to quantum science. We demonstrate a method for the creation of arbitrary optical tweezer potentials using the broadband…
Recent advances in nanotechnologies have prompted the need for tools to accurately and non invasively manipulate individual nanoobjects. Among the possible strategies, optical forces have been widely used to enable nano optical tweezers…
We study a nanofabricated silicon rod levitated in an optical trap. By manipulating the polarization of the light we gain full control over the ro-translational dynamics of the rod. We are able to trap both its centre-of-mass and align it…
Nanostructured dielectric metasurfaces offer unprecedented opportunities to manipulate light by imprinting an arbitrary phase-gradient on an impinging wavefront. This has resulted in the realization of a range of flat analogs to classical…
Nanofluidics, the field interested in flows at the smallest scales, has grown at a fast pace, reaching an ever finer control offluidic and ionic transport at the molecular level. Still, artificial pores are far from reaching the wealth of…
We demonstrate how optical nanofibers can be used to manipulate and probe single-atom fluorescence. We show that fluorescence photons from a very small number of atoms, average atom number of less than 0.1, around the nanofiber can readily…
Nanoscopic pores are used in various systems to attract nanoparticles. In general the behaviour is a result of two types of interactions: the material specific affinity and the solvent-mediated influence also called the depletion force. The…
We find exact conditions for the enhancement or suppression of internal and/or scattered fields and the determination of their spatial distribution or angular momentum through the combination of simple fields. The incident fields can be…
Optical manipulation of micro- and nanoparticles near surfaces is fundamental for applications in sensing and microfluidics, yet controlling particle-surface interactions remains challenging. Here we experimentally investigate light-induced…
While evaporating solvent is a widely used technique to assemble nano-sized objects into desired superstructures, there has been limited work on how the assembled structures are affected by the physical aspects of the process. We present…
Optical tweezers, formed by tightly focused propagating laser beams, offer the unique capability to trap and control microscopic particles over a broad size range. However, the diffraction inherent to propagating optical fields, limits the…
Studies of nanoparticle-based optical matter have only considered spherical constituents. Yet nanoparticles with other shapes are expected to have different local electromagnetic field distributions and therefore interactions with neighbors…
Humankind has long endeavored to control the propagation direction of light. Since time immemorial, shades, lenses and mirrors have been used to control the flow of light. In modern society, with the rapid development of nanotechnology, the…
Recent advances in nanotechnology have created tremendous excitement across different disciplines but in order to fully control and manipulate nano-scale objects, we must understand the forces at work at the nano-scale, which can be very…
Optical nanofibers with subwavelength diameters generate strong evanescent fields, enabling efficient light-matter interactions for optical sensing, spectroscopy, and cold-atom experiments. We report a heat-and-pull system for fabricating…
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.…
The fabrication of functional metamaterials with extreme feature resolution finds a host of applications such as the broad area of surface/light interaction. Non-planar features of such structures can significantly enhance their performance…
Freeform optics aims to expand the toolkit of optical elements by allowing for more complex phase geometries beyond rotational symmetry. Complex, asymmetric curvatures are employed to enhance the performance of optical components while…
The optical trapping and manipulation of small particles is an important tool for probing fluid properties at the microscale. In particular, microrheology exploits the manipulation and rotation of micron-scale particles to probe local…