Related papers: Capped colloids as light-mills in optical traps
Light-induced rotation of absorbing microscopic particles by transfer of angular momentum from light to the material raises the possibility of optically driven micromachines. The phenomenon has been observed using elliptically polarized…
We investigate experimentally the single-particle motion in water of silica colloidal beads half-coated with carbon under the action of a converging laser beam. The beads are self-propelled in this medium by means of self-thermophoresis…
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…
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…
Radiation pressure forces in a focussed laser beam can be used to trap microscopic absorbing particles against a substrate. Calculations based on momentum transfer considerations show that stable trapping occurs before the beam waist, and…
Optical tweezers are powerful tools for high resolution study of surface properties. Such experiments are traditionally performed by studying the active or the brownian fluctuation of trapped particles in the X, Y, Z direction. Here we find…
3D pitch rotation of microparticles and cells assumes importance in a wide variety of applications in biology, physics, chemistry and medicine. Applications such as cell imaging and injection benefit from pitch-rotational manipulation.…
Critical Casimir forces emerge between objects, such as colloidal particles, whenever their surfaces spatially confine the fluctuations of the order parameter of a critical liquid used as a solvent. These forces act at short but…
In the field of microdroplet manipulation, optical tweezers have been used to form and grow droplets, to transport them, or to measure forces between droplet pairs. However, the exploration of out-of-equilibrium phenomena in optically…
Magnetically assembled superparamagnetic colloids have been exploited as fluid mixers, swimmers and delivery systems in several microscale applications. The encapsulation of such colloids in droplets may open new opportunities to build…
Optical vortex traps created from helical modes of light can drive fluid-borne colloidal particles in circular trajectories. Concentric circulating rings of particles formed by coaxial optical vortices form a microscopic Couette cell, in…
We observe clear precessional motion of highly birefringent liquid crystal (LC) particles trapped in a spherically aberrated optical trap which is built around a tilted refractive index stratified medium. For input circularly polarized…
We simulate the transport of colloidal particles driven by a static and homogeneous drift force, and subject to the optical potential created by two lattices of optical tweezers. The lattices of optical tweezers are parallel to each other,…
A single colloidal sphere circulating around a periodically modulated optical vortex trap can enter a dynamical state in which it intermittently alternates between freely running around the ring-like optical vortex and becoming trapped in…
The dynamics of electrons in counter-propagating, circularly polarized laser beams are shown to exhibit attractors whose ability to trap particles depends on the ratio of the beam intensities and a single parameter describing radiation…
How far a particle moves along the optical axis in a holographic optical trap is not simply dictated by the programmed motion of the trap, but rather depends on an interplay of the trap's changing shape and the particle's material…
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…
We report the first experimental study upon the optical trapping and manipulation of topological insulator (TI) particles. By virtue of the unique TI properties, which have a conducting surface and an insulating bulk, the particles present…
Micron sized, neutral, non-dielectric particles immersed in a viscous fluid can be trapped in the focal plane of a Gaussian beam. A particle can absorb energy from such a beam with a large radial intensity gradient, resulting in substantial…
We report a study on the dynamics of absorbing asymmetric carbon clusters trapped by a loosely focused Gaussian beam using photophoretic force. At high laser powers, all the trapped clusters display rotation coupled with oscillation along…