Self-accelerating bessel-like vortex beams: A new tool for optical manipulation

Abstract

Over the past decade, the field of optical manipulation has been “shaped” by intelligent design of nonconventional optical beams. In particular, optical beams carrying angular momentum have provided a new twist to optical tweezers, enabling dynamical spin and rotation of trapped particles. Although optical vortex beams, nondiffracting Bessel beams, and recently, self-accelerating Airy beams have each played a unique role in the arena of particle trapping and manipulation, combining their features would certainly lead to a more powerful tool.A few years ago, we designed and demonstrated diffraction-resisting Bessel-like beams that travel along arbitrary trajectories. With the similar method, the singular beam was shaped in this paper, which owns the form of a higher-order Bessel function with a preserving OAM and a nonexpanding dark “hole” in the main lobe of the beam. The beam can propagate along an arbitrary trajectory, including parabolic, hyperbolic and even three-dimensional (3D) spiraling trajectories. Experimentally, not only we observe such a curved singular beam, but also we employ it to optically trap and rotate microparticles in a 3D spiral motion under the combined action of radiation pressure, gradient force, and the OAM. Our findings may open up new avenues for shaped light in various applications.Over the past decade, the field of optical manipulation has been “shaped” by intelligent design of nonconventional optical beams. In particular, optical beams carrying angular momentum have provided a new twist to optical tweezers, enabling dynamical spin and rotation of trapped particles. Although optical vortex beams, nondiffracting Bessel beams, and recently, self-accelerating Airy beams have each played a unique role in the arena of particle trapping and manipulation, combining their features would certainly lead to a more powerful tool.A few years ago, we designed and demonstrated diffraction-resisting Bessel-like beams that travel along arbitrary trajectories. With the similar method, the singular beam was shaped in this paper, which owns the form of a higher-order Bessel function with a preserving OAM and a nonexpanding dark “hole” in the main lobe of the beam. The beam can propagate along an arbitrary trajectory, including parabolic, hyperbolic and even three-dimensional (3D) spiraling trajectorie...