Since their invention in 1986 by Arthur Ashkin and colleagues, optical tweezers have
become an essential tool in several fields of physics, spectroscopy, biology …

We review the combinations of optical micro‐manipulation with other techniques and their
classical and emerging applications to non‐contact optical separation and sorting of micro …

Whereas the laws of thermodynamics prohibit extraction of useful work from the Brownian
motion of particles in equilibrium, these motions can be “rectified” under nonequilibrium …

Cell motility is a process deriving from the synchronized dynamics of the cytoskeleton. In
several important physiological processes—notably, cancer metastasis—the randomly …

We experimentally demonstrate a class of tractor beams created by coherently superposing
coaxial Bessel beams. These optical conveyors have periodic intensity variations along their …

Propulsive effects of light, which often remain unnoticed in our daily-life experience, manifest
themselves on spatial scales ranging from subatomic to astronomical. Light-mediated forces …

We demonstrate both experimentally and theoretically that a colloidal sphere trapped in a
static optical tweezer does not come to equilibrium, but rather reaches a steady state in …

In 1986, Arthur Ashkin and colleagues published a seminal paper in Optics
Letters,'Observation of a single-beam gradient force optical trap for dielectric particles' which …

Thermalized chemical reactions driven under dynamical load are characteristic of activated
dynamics for arbitrary nonautonomous systems. Recent generalizations of transition state …

Spatially periodic optical fields can be used to sort dielectric microscopic particles as a
function of size, shape or refractive index. In this paper we elucidate through both theory and …