Related papers: Optical alignment and spinning of laser-trapped mi…
Magnetic skyrmions are chiral quasiparticles that show promise for future spintronic applications such as skyrmion racetrack memories and logic devices because of their topological stability, small size (typically $\sim3-500$ nm), and…
Light carries angular momentum as spin and orbital components. The spin-orbit interaction (SOI) of light refers to phenomena in which the spin (left or right circular polarisation) affects the spatial degrees of freedom. Recently, interest…
We present a theoretical analysis of a novel scheme for optical cooling of particles that does not in principle require a closed optical transition. A tightly confined laser beam interacting with a trapped particle experiences a phase…
Experiments on light dragging in a moving medium laid the cornerstones of modern physics more than a century ago, and they still are in the focus of current research. When linearly polarized light is transmitted through a rotating…
Orbital angular momentum (OAM) of photons is carried upon the wave front of an optical vortex and is important in physics research due to its fundamental degree of freedom. As for the interaction with materials, the optical OAM was shown to…
Surface plasmon polaritons carrying orbital angular momentum are of great fundamental and applied interest. However, common approaches for their generation are restricted to having a weak dependence on the properties of the…
The insight that optical vortex beams carry orbital angular momentum (OAM), which emerged in Leiden about 30 years ago, has since led to an ever expanding range of applications and follow-up studies. This paper starts with a short personal…
Besides a linear momentum, optical fields carry an angular momentum (AM), which have two intrinsic components: one is spin angular momentum (SAM) related to the polarization state of the field, and the other is orbital angular momentum…
Optical pumping is an efficient method for initializing and maintaining atomic spin ensembles in a well-defined quantum spin state. Standard optical-pumping methods orient the spins by transferring photonic angular momentum to spin…
Light beams with azimuthal phase dependence [$exp(i \ell\phi)$] carry orbital angular momentum (OAM) which differs fundamentally from spin angular momentum (SAM) associated with polarization. Striking difference between the two momenta is…
Lattice vibration in solids may carry angular momentum. But unlike the intrinsic spin of electrons, the lattice vibration is rarely rotational. To induce angular momentum, one needs to find a material that can accommodate a twisted normal…
It has been observed that achiral nano-particles, such as flat helices, may be subjected to an optical torque even when illuminated by normally incident linearly polarized light. However, the origin of this fascinating phenomenon has so far…
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…
General Relativistic calculations in the linear regime have been made for electromagnetic beams of radiation known as optical vortices. These exotic beams of light carry a physical quantity known as optical orbital angular momentum (OAM).…
We develop a free-carrier theory of the optical absorption of light carrying orbital angular momentum (twisted light) by bulk semiconductors. We obtain the optical transition matrix elements for Bessel-mode twisted light and use them to…
Laboratory optics, typically dealing with monochromatic light beams in a single reference frame, exhibits numerous spin-orbit interaction phenomena due to the coupling between the spin and orbital degrees of freedom of light. Similar…
We demonstrate the excitation, using a structured light beam carrying orbital angular momentum, of the center of mass motion of a single atom in the transverse direction to the beam's propagation. This interaction is achieved with a vortex…
Light is the fundamental medium through which we perceive the world around us. In the modern era, light can not only be used in its raw form but can also be used as a versatile tool. Generally, light fields carry energy and momentum (both…
Optically coupled nanoparticles suffer the action of multiple electromagnetic forces when they are illuminated by light. In general, two kinds of forces are commonly assumed: binding forces that make them attract/repel each other and…
Advances in optical trapping design principles have led to tremendous progress in manipulating nanoparticles (NPs) with diverse functionalities in different environments using bulky systems. However, efficient control and manipulation of…