Related papers: Non-linear bistability in pulsed optical traps
The principle of optical trapping is conventionally based on the interaction of optical fields with linear induced polarizations. However, the optical force originating from the nonlinear polarization becomes significant when nonlinear…
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, 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…
Optical trapping has proven to be a valuable experimental technique for precisely controlling small dielectric objects. However, due to their very nature, conventional optical traps are diffraction limited and require high intensities to…
Optical trapping describes the interaction between light and matter to manipulate micro-objects through momentum transfer. In the case of 3D trapping with a single beam, this is termed optical tweezers. Optical tweezers are a powerful and…
Optically levitated dielectric nanoparticles have become valuable tools for precision sensing and quantum optomechanical experiments. To predict the dynamic properties of a particle trapped in an optical tweezer with high fidelity, a tool…
We demonstrate a technique to estimate the strength of non-linearities present in the trapping potential of an optically levitated nanoparticle. By applying a brief pulsed reduction in trapping laser power of the system such as to squeeze…
We demonstrate a bistable optical trap by tightly focusing a vortex laser beam. The optical potential has the form of a Mexican hat with an additional minimum at the center. The bistable trapping corresponds to a non-equilibrium steady…
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.…
Optical tweezers is a very well-established technique that has developed into a standard tool for trapping and manipulating micron and submicron particles with great success in the last decades. Although the nature of light enforces…
We present a detailed theoretical study of the recent proposal for selective nanomanipulation of nanometric particles above a substrate using near-field optical forces [Chaumet {\it et al.} Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 88}, 123601 (2002)].…
Optical tweezers are powerful tools based on focused laser beams. They are able to trap, manipulate and investigate a wide range of microscopic and nanoscopic particles in different media, such as liquids, air, and vacuum. Key applications…
Optical tweezers confine a particle in an intensity-defined potential well by engaging its local multipoles. In this picture, eliminating far-field scattering from the particle should cancel the optical force, as the multipole moments…
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…
Super-oscillating beams can be used to create light spots whose size is below the diffraction limit with a side ring of high intensity adjacent to them. Optical traps made of the super-oscillating part of such beams exhibit superior…
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…
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…
The force field of optical tweezers is commonly assumed to be conservative, neglecting the complex action of the scattering force. Using a novel method that extracts local forces from trajectories of an optically trapped particle, we…
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…
The forces acting on an optically trapped particle are usually assumed to be conservative. However, the presence of a non-conservative component has recently been demonstrated. Here we propose a technique that permits one to quantify the…