Optical force and torque on small particles induced by polarization singularities

Abstract

Optical forces in the near fields have important applications in on-chip optical manipulations of small particles and molecules. Here, we report a study of optical force and torque on small particles induced by the optical polarization singularities of a gold cylinder. We show that the scattering of the cylinder generates both electric and magnetic C lines (i.e., lines of polarization singularities) in the near fields, and the C lines can induce complex force and torque on a dielectric/magnetic particle. The force and torque manifest dramatic spatial variations with interesting symmetry properties, providing rich degrees of freedom for near-field optical manipulations. The study, for the first time to our knowledge, uncovers the effect of optical polarization singularities on light-induced force and torque on small particles. The results contribute to the understanding of chiral light-matter interactions and can find applications in on-chip optical manipulations and optical sensing.

9 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Topological Polarization Singularities in Metaphotonics
• Identifying Topological Phase Transitions in Experiments Using Manifold Learning
• Polarization Singularities in Light Scattering by Small Particles
• Chiral discrimination by polarization singularities of a metal sphere
• Geometric phase associated with Poincaré beams due to unfolding of fractional optical vortex beams