All-optical controllable trapping and transport of subwavelength particles on a tapered photonic crystal waveguide.

We propose that a tapered photonic crystal waveguide design can unify optical trapping and transport functionalities to advance the controllability of optical manipulation. Subwavelength particles can be trapped by a resonance-enhanced field and transported to a specified position along the waveguide on demand by varying the input wavelength. A simulated transport ability as high as 148 (transport distance/wavelength variation) is obtained by the waveguide with 0.1° tilted angle. Stable trapping of a 50 nm polystyrene particle can be achieved with input power of 7 mW. We anticipate that this design would be beneficial for future life science research and optomechanical applications.

[1]  E. Stelzer,et al.  Optical trapping of dielectric particles in arbitrary fields. , 2001, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision.

[2]  Adel Rahmani,et al.  Optical trapping near a photonic crystal. , 2006, Optics express.

[3]  Manipulation of dielectric particles using photonic crystal cavities , 2006 .

[4]  Lukas Novotny,et al.  Theory of Nanometric Optical Tweezers , 1997 .

[5]  Toshimitsu Asakura,et al.  Radiation forces on a dielectric sphere in the Rayleigh scattering regime , 1996 .

[6]  T. Baba,et al.  Light localizations in photonic crystal line defect waveguides , 2004, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics.

[7]  J Fedeli,et al.  Optical manipulation of microparticles and cells on silicon nitride waveguides. , 2005, Optics express.

[8]  Satoshi Kawata,et al.  Radiation Force Exerted on Subwavelength Particles near a Nanoaperture , 1999 .

[9]  S. Chu,et al.  Observation of a single-beam gradient force optical trap for dielectric particles. , 1986, Optics letters.

[10]  R. Rosenfeld.  Nature , 2009, Otolaryngology--head and neck surgery : official journal of American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.

[11]  T. Asano,et al.  Ultra-high-Q photonic double-heterostructure nanocavity , 2005 .

[12]  S Kawata,et al.  Optically driven Mie particles in an evanescent field along a channeled waveguide. , 1996, Optics letters.

[13]  M. Lipson,et al.  Optical manipulation of nanoparticles and biomolecules in sub-wavelength slot waveguides , 2009, Nature.

[14]  Qianfan Xu,et al.  Guiding and confining light in void nanostructure. , 2004, Optics letters.

[15]  Min Gu,et al.  Laser trapping and manipulation under focused evanescent wave illumination , 2004 .

[16]  S Kawata,et al.  Movement of micrometer-sized particles in the evanescent field of a laser beam. , 1992, Optics letters.