The development of economical optical devices with a reduced footprint foreseeing manipulation, sorting and detection of single cells and other micro particles have been encouraged by cellular biology requirements. Nonetheless, researchers are still ambitious for advances in this field. This paper presents Fresnel zone and phase plates fabricated on mode expanded optical fibres for optical trapping. The diffractive structures were fabricated using focused ion beam milling. The zone plates presented in this work have focal distance of ~5 µm, while the focal distance of the phase plates is ~10 µm. The phase plates are implemented in an optical trapping configuration, and 2D manipulation and detection of 8 µm PMMA beads and yeast cells is reported. This enables new applications for optical trapping setups based on diffractive optical elements on optical fibre tips, where feedback systems can be integrated to automatically detect, manipulate and sort cells.
This Letter reports a new method for the generation of optical vortices using a micropatterned optical fiber tip. Here, a spiral phase plate (2π phase shift) is micromachined on the tip of an optical fiber using a focused ion beam. This is a high resolution method that allows milling the fibers with nanoscale resolution. The plate acts as a beam tailoring system, transforming the fundamental guided mode, specifically a Gaussian mode, into the Laguerre-Gaussian mode (LG01), which carries orbital angular momentum. The experimental results are supported by computational simulations based on the finite-difference time-domain method.
PSS) as an alternative, more advantageous method to the metallization prior to FIB milling. The near field scans of the intensity profile along the optical axis under fiber illumination of a laser at λ = 1.55 μm are presented. We have analyzed the focusing properties and demonstrated the validity of our structure for light coupling into silicon photonics waveguides with improved efficiency and alignment tolerance.
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