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Nonlinear optical effects in trapping nanoparticles with femtosecond pulses

Nature Physics volume 6, pages 1005–1009 (2010)Cite this article

Abstract

The optical trapping technique has been widely used in various areas to manipulate particles, cells, and so forth. The principle of trapping is based on the interaction between optical electric fields and induced linear polarizations. Here we show a novel phenomenon of trapping arising from nonlinear polarization when we trap gold nanoparticles by ultrashort near-infrared laser pulses. That is, the stable trap site is split into two equivalent positions (we call this ‘trap split’). The trap positions are aligned along the direction of the incident laser polarization. The dependencies of trap split on the trapping-laser power and wavelength were investigated. The results were successfully interpreted in terms of the nonlinear polarization caused by the femtosecond pulses. This method may give novel applications to micromachining, nanofabrication, and biological samples as well as atomic and molecular trapping at low temperatures.

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Figure 1: Schematic diagram of the experimental set-up.
Figure 2: Gold nanoparticles trapped by the Ti:sapphire laser in the CW and femtosecond-pulse modes.
Figure 3: The dependence of the distance between the two traps on the average power and wavelength of the trapping laser.
Figure 4: The dipole potential energy (〈Up〉, equation (2) and (5)) plotted against the radial distance from the beam centre (ρ).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Grant Nos. 18205004, 19049015, and 22225002) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Molecular Science, Myodaiji, Okazaki, Aichi 444-8585, Japan

    Yuqiang Jiang, Tetsuya Narushima & Hiromi Okamoto

  2. The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Myodaiji, Okazaki, Aichi 444-8585, Japan

    Tetsuya Narushima & Hiromi Okamoto

Authors
  1. Yuqiang Jiang
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  2. Tetsuya Narushima
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  3. Hiromi Okamoto
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Contributions

All the authors contributed to the work in designing the experiments and analysing the results. Y.J. carried out the experiments. Y.J. and H.O. wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hiromi Okamoto.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Jiang, Y., Narushima, T. & Okamoto, H. Nonlinear optical effects in trapping nanoparticles with femtosecond pulses. Nature Phys 6, 1005–1009 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1776

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