Gear-like rotatable optical trapping with radial carpet beams

Abstract

AbstractOptical tweezers have become a powerful tool in the fields of biology, soft condensed matter physics, and nanotechnology. Here, we report the use of recently introduced radial carpet beams (RCBs) in the optical tweezers setup to trap multiple particles. An RCB is produced by diffraction of a plane or Gaussian beam from an amplitude radial grating. Because of the radial symmetry of the grating, all the diffraction orders are propagated along the optical axis and are used for trapping. Based on the number of grating spokes, the produced RCB has a definite number of high-intensity spots on the transverse plane located over a circular ring. These high-intensity spots of the beam provide multi-traps when it passes through an objective lens and have enough gradient force to trap polystyrene and silica particles. Moreover, the diffracted light from the grating has this property to transfer the angular momentum. We show that the multi-trapped birefringent particles could rotate in their own traps when polarization of the trapping RCB to be circular. In addition, the orbital rotation of the particles is simply executable by manually rotating the grating in its plane around the optical axis.