Engineering
Internal Energy Flows and Optical Trapping
A novel concept, optical currents, opens new possibilities for manipulating matter at the nanoscale.
Converging of two optical traps.
Optical technologies for particle trapping and manipulation, which have developed rapidly in recent years, involve several ponderomotive factors of an electromagnetic field—in particular the field’s energy gradient (a particle tends to stay within the field maxima or minima) and its mechanical momentum (a particle partly absorbs or reflects this momentum and acquires the recoil motion). But new techniques for electromagnetic-field control have also emerged—associated, for example, with the polarization and coherence channels, and especially with scalar and vector beams with arbitrary polarization properties and energy circulation in the vicinity of singular points of light fields.
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