The hand of light for micro/nano-particle manipulation: research progress of optical tweezers

Abstract

Optical tweezer is an important technology for trapping and manipulating micro/nano-particles, which has widely been applied in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and other fields. In this work, based on the research progresses in recent years, we systematically review the main research directions and representative achievements of optical tweezers. We introduce the theoretical basis about the mechanism of capturing objects and several common theoretical models of optical tweezers. According to the distribution of incident light beams, we classify the optical tweezers into structural beam optical tweezer, multi-beam and holographic optical tweezer, near-field evanescent wave tweezer, surface plasmon optical tweezer, optical fiber tweezer, opto-thermoelectric tweezer, femtosecond laser tweezer, and extraordinary optical forces tweezer. And the characteristics and latest developments of optical tweezers are discussed in detail respectively. In terms of innovative applications, we emphatically focus in the fields of biological sample manipulation, molecular detection, naked-eye three dimensional display, etc. In the final section, we provide a summary and prospect about the future development of optical tweezers technology.