BACKGROUND Levitation of large objects has become a widely used technique in science
and engineering, and the control of levitated nano-and micro-objects in vacuum has gained …

Optomechanics is concerned with the use of light to control mechanical objects. As a field, it
has been hugely successful in the production of precise and novel sensors, the …

Tests of quantum mechanics on a macroscopic scale require extreme control over
mechanical motion and its decoherence,–. Quantum control of mechanical motion has been …

The ability to accurately control the dynamics of physical systems by measurement and
feedback is a pillar of modern engineering. Today, the increasing demand for applied …

Understanding gravity in the framework of quantum mechanics is one of the great
challenges in modern physics. However, the lack of empirical evidence has lead to a debate …

We report on rotating an optically trapped silica nanoparticle in vacuum by transferring spin
angular momentum of light to the particle's mechanical angular momentum. At sufficiently …

Levitated optomechanics has great potential in precision measurements, thermodynamics,
macroscopic quantum mechanics, and quantum sensing. Here we synthesize and optically …

Phonon lasers, which exploit coherent amplifications of phonons, are a means to explore
nonlinear phononics, image nanomaterial structures and operate phononic devices …

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 describe a variety of searches for new physics beyond the standard model of particle
physics which may be enabled in the coming years by the use of optically levitated masses …