Single-Beam Optical Conveyor Belt for Chiral Particles

Abstract

A different paradigm is proposed to selectively manipulate and transport small engineered chiral particles and discriminate different enantiomers using unstructured chiral light. It is theoretically shown that the response of a chiral metamaterial particle may be tailored to enable an optical conveyor belt operation with no optical traps, such that for a fixed incident light helicity the nanoparticle is either steadily pushed towards the direction of the photon flow or steadily pulled against the photon flow, independent of its position. Our findings create distinct opportunities for unconventional optical manipulations of tailored nanoparticles and may have applications in sorting racemic mixtures of artificial chiral molecules and in particle delivery.

23 pages, 7 figures, preprint

References in corpus (5)

• 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
• Optical Tractor Beam with Chiral Light

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Unified theory to describe and engineer conservation laws in light-matter interactions
• Unidirectional chiral scattering from single enantiomeric plasmonic nanoparticles
• Lateral Optical Forces on Linearly-Polarized Emitters near a Reciprocal Substrate
• Non-zero helicity extinction in light scattered from achiral (or chiral) small particles located at points of null incident helicity density
• Theory of optical forces on small particles by multiple plane waves