Optical manipulation with metamaterial structures

Abstract

Optical tweezers employing forces produced by light underpin important manipulation tools in many areas of applied and biological physics. Conventional optical tweezers are based on refractive optics, and they require excessive auxiliary optical elements to reshape both amplitude and phase, as well as wavevector and angular momentum of light, and thus impose limitations to the overall cost and integration of optical systems. Metamaterials provide both electric and optically induced magnetic response in subwavelength optical structures, and they are highly beneficial to achieve unprecedented control of light required for many applications, also opening new opportunities for optical manipulation. Here, we review the recent advances in the field of optical tweezers employing the physics and concepts of metamaterials (the so-called meta-tweezers) and demonstrate that metamaterial structures could not only advance classical operations with particles, such as trapping, transporting, and sorting, but they uncover exotic optical forces such as pulling and lateral forces. Remarkably, apart from manipulation of particles, metastructures can be powered dynamically by light to realize ingenious meta-robots. We provide an outlook for future opportunities in this area ranging from enhanced particle manipulation to meta-robot actuation.

49 pages, 5 figures

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• Resolution of the Abraham-Minkowski Controversy
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• Optomechanical Modulation Spectroscopy of Bound-States-In-The-Continuum in a dielectric metasurface
• On-chip optical levitation with a metalens in vacuum

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Nonlinearity-induced optical torque
• Superfast and sub-wavelength orbital rotation of plasmonic particles in focused Gaussian beams
• Switchable optical trapping of Mie-resonant phase-change nanoparticles
• Radiation forces and torques in optics and acoustics
• The Microscopic Ampère formulation for the electromagnetic force density in linear dielectrics
• Optical Supertorque Induced by Mie-Resonant Modes
• Optical Micromanipulations based on Model Predictive Control of Thermoviscous Flows
• A local model for the optical energy and momentum transfer in dielectric media and the microscopic origin of Abraham's force density