Optical trapping and manipulation have emerged as a powerful tool in the biological and physical sciences. In this work, we present a miniature optical tweezers device based on multifocal optical vortex metalens (MOVM). The MOVM is capable of generating multiple focal fields with specific orbital angular momentum at arbitrary position. The optical force of the vortex field exerted on both high-refractive-index particle and low-refractive-index particle are analyzed. The simulation results show that the two kinds of dielectric particles can be trapped simultaneously. Besides, it is also feasible to manipulate plasmonic nanoparticles even under the resonant condition, which is realized by constructing a 4Pi focusing system with metalenses. Moreover, the metalens can be made into an array format that is suitable for trapping and manipulating various nanoparticles with diverse motion behaviors. The work illustrates the potential of such optical tweezers for further development in lab-on-a-chip devices, and may open up new avenues for optical manipulation and their applications in extensive scientific fields.

Optical antennas have been utilized to tailor the emission properties of nanoscale emitters in terms of the intensity, directivity and polarization. In this letter, we further explore the capability of beam steering via the use a spiral plasmonic structure as a transmitting antenna. According to both numerical simulation and experimental observations, the beaming direction can be steered through introducing a displacement of the feeding point to the spiral antenna from the geometrical center. For a 3-turn Archimedes' spiral antenna, experimental results show that steering angles of 3° and 7° are obtainable when the excitation location is transversally shifted from the center by a displacement of 200 nm and 500 nm, respectively. Furthermore, the emitted photons carry spin angular momentum determined by the chirality of the spiral optical antenna. A steerable nanoscale spin photon source may find important applications in single molecule sensing, quantum optical information processing and integrated photonic circuits.

We demonstrate a novel detection scheme for the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light using circular plasmonic lens. Owing to a division-of-amplitude interference phenomenon between the surface plasmon waves and directly transmitted light, specific intensity distributions are formed near the plasmonic lens surface under different OAM excitations. Due to different phase behaviors of the evanescent surface plasmon wave and the direct transmission, interference patterns rotate as the observation plane moves away from the lens surface. The rotation direction is a direct measure of the sign of OAM, while the amount of rotation is linked to the absolute value of the OAM. This OAM detection scheme is validated experimentally and numerically. Analytical expressions are derived to provide insights and explanations of this detection scheme. This work forms the basis for the realization of a compact and integrated OAM detection architect that may significantly benefit optical information processing with OAM states.

Coupling nanoscale emitters via optical antennas enables comprehensive control of photon emission in terms of intensity, directivity and polarization. In this work we report highly directional emission of circularly polarized photons from quantum dots coupled to a spiral optical antenna. The structural chirality of the spiral antenna imprints spin state to the emitted photons. Experimental results reveal that a circular polarization extinction ratio of 10 is obtainable. Furthermore, increasing the number of turns of the spiral gives rise to higher antenna gain and directivity, leading to higher field intensity and narrower angular width of emission pattern in the far field. For a five-turn Archimedes' spiral antenna, field intensity increase up to 70-fold simultaneously with antenna directivity of 11.7 dB has been measured in the experiment. The highly directional circularly polarized photon emission from such optically coupled spiral antenna may find important applications in single molecule sensing, quantum optics information processing and integrated photonic circuits as a nanoscale spin photon source.

The principle of optical trapping is conventionally based on the interaction of optical fields with linear induced polarizations. However, the optical force originating from the nonlinear polarization becomes significant when nonlinear optical nanoparticles are trapped by ultrafast laser pulses. Herein we establish the time-averaged optical forces on a nonlinear optical nanoparticle using highrepetition-rate ultrafast laser pulses, based on the linear and nonlinear polarization effects. We investigate the dependence of the optical forces on the magnitudes and signs of the refractive nonlinearities. It is found that the self-focusing effect enhances the trapping ability, whereas the selfdefocusing effect leads to the splitting of potential well at the focal plane and destabilizes the optical trap. Our results show good agreement with the reported experimental observations and provide a theoretical support for capturing nonlinear optical particles. PACS numbers: 42.65.Jx, 78.20.Bh, 78.67.Bf, 62.65.Re Optical trapping, also known as optical tweezers, is a useful technique for noncontact and noninvasive manipulation of small particles using a focused laser beam [1]. This technique has wide applications in physics, chemistry, biology, and other disciplines [2, 3]. Up to now, the stable optical trapping of micro-and nanoparticles have been extensively demonstrated by the use of continuouswave (CW) Gaussian laser beam [1-3], cylindrical vector beam [4], evanescent field [5], plasmonic field [6], spinning light fields [7], etc. Lots of efforts have been devoted to trap a variety of small objects, such as dielectric particles [1], metallic Rayleigh nanoparticles [4], semiconductor quantum dots [8], and biological cells [9].Recently, optical trapping technique has been extended by substituting CW laser with high-repetition-rate ultrafast laser pulses [10][11][12]. With the ultrafast laser pulses, several novel phenomena have been observed, including the trapping split behavior in the process of capturing gold nanoparticles by ultrafast near-infrared laser pulses [13], a controllable directional ejection of optically trapped nanoparticles [14], and the immobilization dynamics of a single polystyrene sphere [15]. It should be noted that the optical force originating from the nonlinear polarization becomes significant and cannot be neglected if the trapped particles exhibit nonlinear optical effects. Moreover, the experimental observations have revealed that the nonlinear optical effects could enhance the optical force [8,16] or modify the optical trapping potential [13].To quantitatively appraise the trapping ability, the optical force exerted on a spherical nanoparticle arising from the linear polarization has been calculated using various approaches, such as Rayleigh scattering formulae [1], Maxwell's stress tensor [17], and discrete dipole approximation [18]. For a nonlinear optical Rayleigh particle, however, the optical force unambiguously originates from the contribution of both the linear and nonlinear induced polariz...

In this Letter, we study the emission properties of an electric dipole emitter coupled to a plasmonic spiral structure. The plasmonic spiral structure functions as an optical antenna, coupling the electric dipole emission into circularly polarized unidirectional emission in the far field. Increasing number of turns of the spiral leads to narrower angular width of the emission pattern in the far field. For a spiral antenna with six turns, antenna directivity of 23.5 dB with a directional emission into a narrow angular cone of 4.3° can be achieved. The emitted photons carry spin that is essentially determined by the handedness of the spiral antenna. By reversing the spiral, one can switch the polarization of the emission field between left-hand and right-hand circular polarizations. The spiral antenna may be used as a nanoscale circular polarization source in single molecule sensing, single-photo sources, and integrated photonic circuits.

In this work, we propose a novel strategy to optically trap and manipulate metallic nanoparticles using evanescent vortex Bessel beam (EVBB). A versatile method is presented to generate evanescent Bessel beam with tunable optical angular momentum by focusing a radially polarized vortex beam onto a one-dimensional photonics band gap structure. The behavior of a metallic nanoparticle in the EVBB is numerically studied. We show that such particle can be stably trapped near the surface. The orbital angular momentum drives the metallic nanoparticle to orbit around the beam axis, and the direction of the orbital motion is controlled by the handedness of the helical phase front. The technique demonstrated in this work may open up new avenues for optical manipulation, and the non-contact tunable orbiting dynamics of the trapped particle may find important applications in higher resolution imaging techniques.

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) state of photons offer an attractive additional degree of freedom that has found a variety of applications. Measurement of OAM state, which is a critical task of these applications, demands photonic integrated devices for improved fidelity, miniaturization, and reconfiguration. Here we report the design of a silicon-integrated OAM receiver that is capable of detecting distinct and variable OAM states. Furthermore, the reconfiguration capability of the detector is achieved by applying voltage to the GeSe film to form gratings with alternate states. The resonant wavelength for arbitrary OAM state is demonstrated to be tunable in a quasi-linear manner through adjusting the duty cycle of the gratings. This work provides a viable approach for the realization of a compact integrated OAM detection device with enhanced functionality that may find important applications in optical communications and information processing with OAM states.