No Arabic abstract
The tremendous progress in light scattering engineering made it feasible to develop optical tweezers allowing capture, hold, and controllable displacement of submicronsize particles and biological structures. However, the momentum conservation law imposes a fundamental restriction on the optical pressure to be repulsive in paraxial fields. Although different approaches to get around this restriction have been proposed, they are rather sophisticated and rely on either wavefront engineering or utilize active media. Herein, we revisit the issue of optical forces by their analytic continuation to the complex frequency plane and considering their behavior in transient. We show that the exponential excitation at the complex frequency offers an intriguing ability to achieve a pulling force for a passive resonator of any shape and composition even in the paraxial approximation, the remarkable effect which is not reduced to the Fourier transform. The approach is linked to the virtual gain effect when an appropriate transient decay of the excitation signal makes it weaker than the outgoing signal that carries away greater energy and momentum flux density. The approach is implemented for the Fabry-Perot cavity and a high refractive index dielectric nanoparticle, a fruitful platform for intracellular spectroscopy and lab-on-a-chip technologies where the proposed technique may found unprecedented capabilities.
We demonstrate both analytically and numerically the existence of optical pulling forces acting on particles located near plasmonic interfaces. Two main factors contribute to the appearance of this negative reaction force. The interference between the incident and reflected waves induces a rotating dipole with an asymmetric scattering pattern while the directional excitation of surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) enhances the linear momentum of scattered light. The strongly asymmetric SPP excitation is determined by spin-orbit coupling of the rotating dipole and surface plasmon polariton. As a result of the total momentum conservation, the force acting on the particle points in a direction opposite to the incident wave propagation. We derive analytical expressions for the force acting on a dipolar particles placed in the proximity of plasmonic surfaces. Analytical expressions for this pulling force are derived within the dipole approximation and are in excellent agreement with results of electromagnetic numerical calculations. The forces acting on larger particles are analyzed numerically, beyond the dipole approximation.
This paper proposes a new method to achieve robust optical pulling of particles by using an air waveguide sandwiched between two chiral hyperbolic metamaterials. The pulling force is induced by mode conversion between a pair of one-way-transport surface-arc waves supported on the two metamaterial surfaces of the waveguide. The surface arcs bridge the momentum gaps between isolated bulk equifrequency surfaces (EFSs) and are topologically protected by the nontrivial Chern numbers of the EFSs. When an incident surface-arc wave with a relatively small wavenumber $k_{x1}$ is scattered by the particle, a part of its energy is transferred to the other surface-arc mode with $k_{x2}(>k_{x1}). Because the electromagnetic wave acquires an additional forward momentum from the particle proportional to $k_{x2}-k_{x1}$ during this process, the particle will always be subjected to an optical pulling force irrespective of its material, shape and size. Since the chiral surface-arc waves are immune to backscattering from local disorders and the metamaterials are isotropic in the xy plane, robust optical pulling can be achieved in a curved air waveguide and can go beyond standard optical pulling mechanisms which are limited to pull in a straight-line.
We propose to use optical tweezers to probe the Casimir interaction between microspheres inside a liquid medium for geometric aspect ratios far beyond the validity of the widely employed proximity force approximation. This setup has the potential for revealing unprecedented features associated to the non-trivial role of the spherical curvatures. For a proof of concept, we measure femtonewton double layer forces between polystyrene microspheres at distances above $400$ nm by employing very soft optical tweezers, with stiffness of the order of fractions of a fN/nm. As a future application, we propose to tune the Casimir interaction between a metallic and a polystyrene microsphere in saline solution from attraction to repulsion by varying the salt concentration. With those materials, the screened Casimir interaction may have a larger magnitude than the unscreened one. This line of investigation has the potential for bringing together different fields including classical and quantum optics, statistical physics and colloid science, while paving the way for novel quantitative applications of optical tweezers in cell and molecular biology.
Here we propose and demonstrate an all-optical wavelength-routing approach which uses a tuning mechanism based upon the optical gradient force in a specially-designed nano-optomechanical system. The resulting mechanically-compliant spiderweb resonantor realizes seamless wavelength routing over a range of 3000 times the intrinsic channel width, with a tuning efficiency of 309-GHz/mW, a switching time of less than 200-ns, and 100% channel-quality preservation over the entire tuning range. These results indicate the potential for radiation pressure actuated devices to be used in a variety of photonics applications, such as channel routing/switching, buffering, dispersion compensation, pulse trapping/release, and widely tunable lasers.
In this work we combine the large per-photon optical gradient force with the sensitive feedback of a high quality factor whispering-gallery microcavity. The cavity geometry, consisting of a pair of silica disks separated by a nanoscale gap, shows extremely strong dynamical backaction, powerful enough to excite giant coherent oscillations even under heavily damped conditions (mechanical Q=4). In vacuum, the threshold for regenerative mechanical oscillation is lowered to an optical input power of only 270-nanoWatts, or roughly 1000 stored cavity photons, and efficient cooling of the mechanical motion is obtained with a temperature compression factor of 13-dB for 4-microWatts of dropped optical input power.