Optical guiding of absorbing nanoclusters in air

TL;DR

This paper presents a new all-optical method using photophoretic force to trap and guide absorbing aerosol particles of various sizes in air, enabling controlled manipulation and acceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optical trapping technique for absorbing nanoclusters in open air, demonstrating three-dimensional guiding and acceleration of particles.

Findings

Successful guiding of particles from 100 nm to 10 μm in air

Particles accelerated up to 1 cm/s

Simultaneous trapping of multiple particles

Abstract

We introduce a novel approach for all-optical trapping and manipulation of absorbing aerosol particles based on a photophoretic force. We demonstrate experimentally, in open air, the robust three-dimensional guiding of agglomerates of carbon nanoparticles with the size spanned for two orders of magnitude, from 100 nanometers to 10 microns, over the distances of a few millimeters, as well as their acceleration up to velocities of 1 cm/s and simultaneous trapping of a large number of particles.