Related papers: Collecting single molecules with conventional opti…
Optical tweezers are a technique in which microscopic-sized particles, including living cells and bacteria, can be non-intrusively trapped with high accuracy solely using focused light. The technique has therefore become a powerful tool in…
We demonstrate a novel technique for creating, manipulating, and combining femtoliter volume chemical containers. Possible uses include creating controlled chemical reactions involving small quantities of reagent, and studying the dynamics…
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…
Trapping of single ultracold atoms is an important tool for applications ranging from quantum computation and communication to sensing. However, most experimental setups, while very precise and versatile, can only be operated in specialized…
We demonstrate a miniature, fiber-coupled optical tweezer to trap a single atom. The same fiber is used to trap a single atom and to read out its fluorescence. To obtain a low background level, the tweezer light is chopped, and we measure…
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…
We demonstrate that a set of microfabricated electrodes can be coupled to a commercial optical tweezers device, implementing a hybrid electro-optical trap with multiple functionalities to manipulate micro/nanoparticles in suspension. Our…
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…
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…
Optical metasurfaces of subwavelength pillars have provided new capabilities for the versatile definition of the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light. In this work, we demonstrate that an efficient dielectric metasurface lens can be…
We propose an enantioselective scheme to sort homogeneous chiral particles using optical tweezers. For a certain range of material parameters, we show that a highly focused circularly-polarized laser beam traps particles of a specific…
We recently demonstrated that strings of trapped atoms inside a standing wave optical dipole trap can be rearranged using optical tweezers [Y. Miroshnychenko et al., Nature, in press (2006)]. This technique allows us to actively set the…
Polyatomic molecules have rich structural features that make them uniquely suited to applications in quantum information science, quantum simulation, ultracold chemistry, and searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. However, a key…
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…
The manipulation of microparticles using optical forces has led to many applications in the life and physical sciences. To extend optical trapping towards the nano-regime, in this work we demonstrate trapping of single nanoparticles in…
Optical tweezers exploit light--matter interactions to trap particles ranging from single atoms to micrometer-sized eukaryotic cells. For this reason, optical tweezers are a ubiquitous tool in physics, biology, and nanotechnology. Recently,…
Optical and optoelectronic techniques for micro- and nano-object manipulation are becoming essential tools in nano- and bio-technology. A remarkable optoelectronic technique that has experimented a strong development in the last few years…
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.…
Non-invasive optical manipulation of particles has emerged as a powerful and versatile tool for biological study and nanotechnology. In particular, trapping and rotation of cells, cell nuclei and sub-micron particles enables unique…
We demonstrate photophoretic force-based optical trapping of multiple absorbing particles in air by loosely focusing a Gaussian beam with a series of convex lenses of different focal lengths, and investigate the dependence of the number of…