Optical trapping with focused Airy beams

Abstract

Airy beams are attractive owing to their two intriguing properties--self-bending and nondiffraction--that are particularly helpful for optical manipulation of particles. We perform theoretical and experimental investigations into the focusing property of Airy beams and provide insight into the trapping ability of tightly focused Airy beams. Experiment on optical tweezers demonstrates that the focused Airy beams can create multiple traps for two-dimensional confining particles, and the stable traps exist in the vicinity of the main intensity lobes in the focused beams. The trapping pattern can be varied with changes in the cross section of the focused beam. The focused Airy beam offers a novel way of optically manipulating microparticles.

Beam wander of partially coherent Airy beams

“…Unlike ordinary optical wavefronts, an Airy beam propagates along parabolic trajectories (self-accelerating) [2] and are endowed with nondiffracting and self-healing properties [3,4]. Since then, the Airy beam has been attracting a great deal of interest both in theory and experiment, with applications ranging from clearing optically mediated particles [5], producing self-bending plasma channels [6], and trapping and guiding microparticles [7,8], to electron capture and acceleration drives [9,10], ultrafast self-accelerating pulses [11], and Airy light bullets accelerating in both transverse dimensions and time [12]. An Airy beam was generated by the optical Fourier transform of a Gaussian input beam on which a cubic phase was imposed in the first experiment [1].…”

Phase singularities and energy fluxes of a noncanonical vortex dipole Airy beam in the far field

“…Introduction A special type of nondiffracting self-bending Airy beams has sparked considerable theoretical and experimental enthusiasm since the seminal work of Siviloglou and Christodoulides in 2007 [1,2]. Tremendous effort has been devoted to elucidate fundamental features and explore potential applications such as self-healing [3,4], cleaning microparticles [5], optical micromanipulation [6,7], plasma guidance [8,9], and vacuum electron acceleration [10,11]. Moreover, the study of Airy beams has been extended from fully coherent fields to partially coherent fields [12][13][14], from paraxial cases to nonparaxial cases [15][16][17], and from general optical systems to nonlinear mediums [18][19][20][21][22][23][24].…”

Design, transform and control of optical field in discrete optical system: an example

“…In particular, such a beam has an ability to remain transverse accelerating during propagation 4 , which moves on a parabolic trajectory very much like a body under the action of gravity. Owing to these unique properties, Airy beams have found many potential applications, such as optical micro-manipulation 5, 6 , imaging technology 7 , surface plasmon polaritons 8, 9 and laser micromachining 10 . The direct generation of the Airy beam requires combining phase and amplitude modulation by imposing a cubic phase on a Gaussian beam and then taking its Fourier transform using a lens.…”