No Arabic abstract
Although it is commonly believed that all the volumetric optical force laws should lead to the same total optical force for chiral and achiral objects, this idea has been invalidated in some recent works by investigating several previous experiments involving material background. To identify the exact reason of such significant disagreement, we inspect two tractor beam and one lateral force experiments on using distinct stress tensors (STs). To solve the problems of total force, we propose two consistency conditions of time averaged forces. We demonstrate that exactly at the boundary of an object, the difference of the consistent external Minkowski ST and internal ST of Chu (and Einstein-Laub) is found in agreement with the surface force yielded by Chu (and Einstein-Laub) force only when the background is air rather than a material. We identify this as one of the main reasons (among few other identified reasons) of the disagreements observed for real experiments. Finally, based on the proposed consistency conditions, we demonstrate that: by modifying the Einstein-Laub or Chu formulation, time-averaged STs and volume forces are obtainable those can overcome the aforementioned inconsistencies of real experiments for both chiral and achiral Mie objects embedded in even complex material backgrounds.
Recently, we proposed a metasurface design for chiral sensing that (i) results in enhanced chiroptical signals by more than two orders of magnitude for ultrathin, subwavelength, chiral samples over a uniform and accessible area, (ii) allows for complete measurements of the total chirality (magnitude and sign of both its real and imaginary part), and (iii) offers the possibility for a crucial signal reversal (excitation with reversed polarization) that enables chirality measurements in an absolute manner, i.e., without the need for sample removal. Our design is based on the anisotropic response of the metasurface, rather than the superchirality of the generated near-fields, as in most contemporary nanophotonic-based chiral sensing approaches. Here, we derive analytically, and verify numerically, simple formulas that provide insight to the sensing mechanism and explain how anisotropic metasurfaces, in general, offer additional degrees of freedom with respect to their isotropic counterparts. We provide a detailed discussion of the key functionalities and benefits of our proposed design and we demonstrate practical measurement schemes for the unambiguous determination of an unknown chirality. Last, we provide the design principles towards broadband operation - from near-infrared to near-ultraviolet frequencies - opening the way for highly sensitive nanoscale chiroptical spectroscopy.
We derive a set of design requirements that lead to structures suitable for molecular circular dichroism (CD) enhancement. Achirality of the structure and two suitably selected sequentially incident beams of opposite helicity ensures that the CD signal only depends on the chiral absorption properties of the molecules, and not on the achiral ones. Under this condition, a helicity preserving structure, which prevents the coupling of the two polarization handednesses, maximizes the enhancement of the CD signal for a given ability of the structure to enhance the field. When the achirality and helicity preservation requirements are met, the enhancement of the CD signal is directly related to the enhancement of the field. Next, we design an exemplary structure following the requirements. The considered system is a planar array of silicon cylinders under normally incident plane-wave illumination. Full-wave numerical calculations show that the enhancement of the transmission CD signal is between 6.5 and 3.75 for interaction lengths between 1.25 and 3 times the height of the cylinders.
Up to now, in the literature of optical manipulation, optical force due to chirality usually coexists with the non-chiral force and the chiral force usually takes a very small portion of the total force. In this work, we investigate a case where the optical force exerted on an object is purely due to the chirality while there is zero force on non-chiral object. We find that a trapping force arises on chiral particles when it is placed in a field consisted of two orthogonally polarized counter-propagating plane waves. We have revealed the underlying physics of this force by modeling the particle as a chiral diploe and analytically study the optical force. We find besides chirality; the trapping force is also closely related to the dual electric-magnetic symmetry of field and dual asymmetry of material. We also demonstrate that the proposed idea is not restricted to dipolar chiral objects only. Chiral Mie objects can also be trapped based on the technique proposed in this article. Notably, such chiral trapping forces have been found robust by varying several parameters throughout the investigation. This trapping force may find applications in identifying objects chirality and the selective trapping of chiral objects.
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.
Modern distributed systems often rely on so called weakly-consistent databases, which achieve scalability by sacrificing the consistency guarantee of distributed transaction processing. Such databases have been formalised in two different styles, one based on abstract executions and the other based on dependency graphs. The choice between these styles has been made according to intended applications: the former has been used to specify and verify the implementation of these databases, and the latter to prove properties of programs running on top of the databases. In this paper, we present a set of novel algebraic laws (i.e. inequations) that connect these two styles of specifications; the laws relate binary relations used in a specification based on abstract executions, to those used in a specification based on dependency graphs. We then show that this algebraic connection gives rise to so called robustness criteria, conditions which ensures that a program running on top of a weakly-consistent database does not exhibit anomalous behaviours due to this weak consistency. These criteria make it easy to reason about programs running on top of these databases, and may become a basis for dynamic or static program analyses. For a certain class of consistency models specifications, we prove a full abstraction result that connects the two styles of specifications.