Optical tweezing using tunable optical lattices along a few-mode silicon waveguide

2018

International audience; Fourteen years ago, optical lattices and holographic tweezers were considered as a revolution, allowing for trapping andmanipulating multiple particles at the same time using laser light. Since then, near-field optical forces have arousedtremendous interest as they enable efficient trapping of a wide range of objects, from living cells to atoms, in integrateddevices. Yet, handling at will multiple objects using a guided light beam remains a challenging task for current on-chipoptical trapping techniques. We demonstrate here on-chip optical trapping of dielectric microbeads and bacteria usingone-dimensional optical lattices created by near-field mode beating along a f…