Optical alignment and spinning of laser-trapped microscopic particles

By M. Friese, T. Nieminen, N. Heckenberg, Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop. Nature, 2003

962 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Light-induced rotation of absorbing microscopic particles by transfer of angular momentum from light to the material raises the possibility of optically driven micromachines. The phenomenon has been observed using elliptically polarized laser beams or beams with helical phase structure,. But it is difficult to develop high power in such experiments because of overheating and unwanted axial forces, limiting the achievable rotation rates to a few hertz. This problem can in principle be overcome by using transparent particles, transferring angular momentum by a mechanism first observed by Beth in 1936, when he reported a tiny torque developed in a quartz ‘wave-plate’ owing to the change in polarization of transmitted light. Here we show that an optical torque can be induced on microscopic birefringent particles of calcite held by optical tweezers. Depending on the polarization of the incident beam, the particles either become aligned with the plane of polarization (and thus can be rotated through specified angles) or spin with constant rotation frequency. Because these microscopic particles are transparent, they can be held in three-dimensional optical traps at very high power without heating, leading to rotation rates of over 350 Hz.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51e23209c681706ed54c19ddc06c9fa1d7cb6d74

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Biomedical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Integrated optofluidics: A new river of light (2007, background): “More generally, optical tweezers are of high interest for optofluidic devices to trap or actuate microelements within fluid”
Tweezers with a twist (2011, methodology): “In 1998, a beautiful experiment by Rubinsztein-Dunlop and co-worker”
Shaping the future of manipulation (2011, background): “Studies of trapped particles, in which momentum transfer can cause microparticles to rotate at velocities of up to several hundred hert”
Force-controllable, optically driven micromachines fabricated by single-step two-photon microstereolithography (2003, background): “Almost all the optical rotators and microparticles reported previously are not fixed to a base and are dispersed freely in a liquid [ 5 ]‐[11].”