Optical trapping describes the interaction between light and matter to manipulate micro-
objects through momentum transfer. In the case of 3D trapping with a single beam, this is …

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 …

Torque sensors such as the torsion balance enabled the first determination of the
gravitational constant by Henri Cavendish and the discovery of Coulomb's law. Torque …

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 …

Results are reported from a search for a class of composite dark matter models with feeble
long-range interactions with normal matter. We search for impulses arising from passing …

Rotations of microscale rigid bodies exhibit pronounced quantum phenomena that do not
exist for their centre-of-mass motion. By levitating nanoparticles in ultra-high vacuum …

This paper demonstrates cooling of the center-of-mass motion of 10-μ m-diameter optically
levitated silica spheres to an effective temperature of 50±22 μ K, achieved by minimizing the …

What gravitational field is generated by a massive quantum system in a spatial
superposition? Despite decades of intensive theoretical and experimental research, we still …

A levitated nanomechanical oscillator under ultrahigh vacuum is highly isolated from its
environment. It has been predicted that this isolation leads to very low mechanical …