Optical Tractor Beam with Chiral Light

Abstract

We suggest a novel mechanism to induce the motion of a chiral material body towards an optical source. Our solution is based on the interference between a chiral light beam and its reflection on an opaque mirror. Surprisingly, it is theoretically shown that the electromagnetic response of the material may be tailored in such a way that independent of the specific body location with the respect to the mirror, it is always pushed upstream against the photon flow associated with the incoming wave. Moreover, it is proven that by controlling the handedness of the incoming light it may be possible to harness the sign of the optical force, switching from a pulling force to a pushing force.

preprint,16 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Backward Pulling Force from a Forward Propagating Beam
• Negative refractive index due to chirality
• Chiral metamaterials: retrieval of the effective parameters with and without substrate
• Design of Linear-to-Circular Polarization Transformers Made of Long Densely Packed Metallic Helices

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Fano-enhanced pulling and pushing optical force on active plasmonic nanoparticles
• Optical Force and Torque on Dipolar Dual Chiral Particles
• Single-Beam Optical Conveyor Belt for Chiral Particles
• Optical Forces in Coupled Chiral Particles
• Lateral Optical Forces on Linearly-Polarized Emitters near a Reciprocal Substrate
• Theory of optical forces on small particles by multiple plane waves
• Tractor beams with optimal pulling force using structured waves
• Radiation forces and torques in optics and acoustics
• All-optical manipulation of photonic membranes
• Consistency of time averaged optical force laws for embedded chiral and achiral objects