Transverse manipulation of particles using Bessel beam of tunable size generated by cross-phase modulation

Abstract

We report on a method to achieve multiple microscopic particles being trapped and manipulated transversely by using a size-tunable Bessel beam generated by cross-phase modulation (XPM) based on the thermal nonlinear optical effect. The results demonstrate that multiple polystyrene particles can be stably trapped simultaneously, and the number of the trapped particles can be controlled by varying the trapping beam power. In addition, the trapped particles can be manipulated laterally with micron-level precision by changing the size of J0 Bessel beam. This work provides a simple but efficient way to trap and manipulate multiple particles simultaneously, which would have potential applications in many fields such as cell sorting and transportation.