Optical trapping gets structure: Structured light for advanced optical manipulation

Abstract

The pace of innovations in the field of optical trapping has ramped up in the past couple of years. The implementation of structured light, leading to groundbreaking inventions such as high-resolution microscopy or optical communication, has unveiled the unexplored potential for optical trapping. Advancing from a single Gaussian light field as trapping potential, optical tweezers have gotten more and more structure; innovative trapping landscapes have been developed, starting from multiple traps realized by holographic optical tweezers, via complex scalar light fields sculpted in amplitude and phase, up to polarization-structured and highly confined vectorial beams. In this article, we provide a timely overview on recent advances in advanced optical trapping and discuss future perspectives given by the combination of optical manipulation with the emerging field of structured light.