Influence of multiple particles in optical tweezers on the trapping efficiency

Since the early times of Arthur Ashkins groundbreaking experiments on optical tweezers, a great number of theoretical works was dedicated to this subject. Most of them treated the optical trapping of single spherical or elliptical particles. In the last years optical tweezers have become more and more a tool for assembling three dimensional structures using single microspheres as building blocks. Since all structures and particles inside the light beams influence the properties of the traps, we investigated theoretically the influence of additional single particles and particle arrays on the properties of optical traps. For this reason a geometrical optics based model is used with the inherent flexibility to be applied for various shapes and particle numbers.