Giant Optical Manipulation

Abstract

We demonstrate a new principle of optical trapping and manipulation increasing more than 1000 times the manipulation distance by harnessing strong thermal forces while suppressing their stochastic nature with optical vortex beams. Our approach expands optical manipulation of particles into a gas media and provides a full control over trapped particles, including the optical transport and pinpoint positioning of ∼100 μm objects over a meter-scale distance with ±10 μm accuracy.

Conical refraction: fundamentals and applications

“…The low intensity regions have been formed using, for instance, interference of multiple laser beams, partially spatially coherent optical vortices or laser beams affected by optical aberrations. The suitability of an optical bottle for particle trapping and manipulation has been confirmed in experiments with atoms [170,171] and absorbing particles [86,143,172,173].…”

“…Their applications range from particle trapping [86], subdiffraction limited tighter focusing [87] and plasmon excitation [88] to laser machining [89]. Laguerre-Gauss beams are well known examples of light beams possessing optical vortices forming a straight nodal line surrounded by light [90].…”

“…However, these methods have several drawbacks such as the fact that in some of them the intensity minimum is not exactly equal to zero, the extreme precise control on the optical elements being used, the field fluctuations introduced at and close to the zero-amplitude point, or the non trivial generation of Laguerre-Gauss and cylindrical-vector and vortex beams [101]. Optical bottle beams have applications in optical tweezers for trapping particles with a refractive index lower than the surrounding medium, using the photophoretic force for instance [86], or in cold atom trapping with the possibility of creating an all optical blue-detuned trap that operates in the zero-intensity region [102].…”

Photophoretic trapping-Raman spectroscopy for single pollens and fungal spores trapped in air

“…In PTRS, a light-absorbing particle is trapped in air mainly by photophoretic forces that can be up to 10 5 times stronger than RF [45][46][47]. While the RF force results from the direct transfer of momentum from scattered or absorbed photons, the photophoretic force results indirectly from a particle absorbing photons in a spatially non-uniform manner leading to a non-uniform temperature at the particle surface.…”

“…We performed an initial estimation assuming homogenous spherical particles illuminated by a plane wave using the approximations and derivations in Ref. [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52]. We used Eq.…”