Colloquium: Gripped by light: Optical binding

Abstract

͑Published 3 June 2010͒The light-matter interaction has been at the heart of major advances from the atomic scale right to the microscopic scale over the past four decades. Confinement by light, embodied by the area of optical trapping, has had a major influence across all of the natural sciences. However, an emergent and powerful topic within this field that has steadily merged but not gained much recognition is optical binding: the importance of exploring the optically mediated interaction between assembled objects that can cause attractive and repulsive forces and dramatically influence the way they assemble and organize themselves. This offers routes for colloidal self-assembly, crystallization, and organization of templates for biological and colloidal sciences. In this Colloquium, this emergent area is reviewed looking at the pioneering experiments in the field and the various theoretical approaches that aim to describe this behavior. The latest experimental studies in the field are reviewed and theoretical approaches are now beginning to converge to describe the binding behavior seen. Recent links between optical binding and nonlinearity are explored as well as future themes and challenges.

Giant resonant light forces in microspherical photonics

“…The most notable advances include the use of diffractionless and/or engineered optical beams such as Bessel, 4,5 Airy, 6 optical lattices, 7 miniaturized fiber-optics tweezers 8 and electromagnetic fields in optically bounded structures. [9][10][11] These approaches stimulated observations of optical pulling forces 12 and optical lift 13 effects. Most recently, near-field optical forces have been explored in the chip-scale optical devices integrated with microfluidic systems.…”

Speed enhancement of multi-particle chain in a traveling standing wave

“…In the case where multiple particles are simultaneously trapped a mutual interaction between the particles takes place. This interaction is also called optical binding 7 and modifies the particles' equilibrium positions or can even create self-arranged structures of the particles. [8][9][10][11][12][13] In the case where multiple illuminated particles are in motion within the fluid, the hydrodynamic interactions take place which make the inter-particle interactions even more complex.…”

Interparticle Interactions: Energy Potentials, Energy Transfer, and Nanoscale Mechanical Motion in Response to Optical Radiation

“…These optically induced interparticle interactions give rise to forces and torques, usually described as optical binding although the forces are not necessarily attractive in form, which are the subject of particularly interesting recent research. 10,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45] The phenomenon has increasingly been advocated as a tool for the optical manipulation and configuration of particles, and many optically induced arrays have been observed experimentally. 8,46 In optical binding, particles 1 Following the optical binding process, which is described by forward Rayleigh scattering, it seems natural to consider the non-forward case where the energy states of the two particles also remain unchanged.…”