A revision of the forces exerted in the Rayleigh regime by a tighlty focused optical vortex tweezer

TL;DR

This paper revises the theoretical calculation of optical forces exerted by tightly focused optical vortex beams in the Rayleigh regime, highlighting the significance of the longitudinal field component and its effects on force components and angular momentum coupling.

Contribution

It introduces a corrected model accounting for the longitudinal field component, revealing its impact on force magnitude and spin-orbit angular momentum interactions in optical tweezers.

Findings

Longitudinal field component significantly alters force magnitudes.

Coupling between spin and orbital angular momentum is introduced.

Revised forces differ notably from previous models ignoring the longitudinal field.

Abstract

Optical tweezers use light from a tightly focused laser beam to manipulate the motion of tiny particles. When the laser light is strongly focused, but still paraxial, its e/m field is characterized by a longitudinal component which is of magnitude comparable to the transverse ones and which has been ignored in the theoretical analysis of the tweezing forces. In our work we revise the calculations of the various components of the radiation pressure force, within the limits of Rayleigh regime or dipole approximation, in the case where a tiny particle interacts, in free space, with a circularly polarized optical vortex beam, by taking into account this ignored field term. We show that this term is responsible for considerable modifications in the magnitude of the various components, moreover and also for the appearance of terms involving the coupling of the spin angular momentum (SAM) and the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of the photons of the vortex beam. We compare our findings with the ones taken ignoring the longitudinal field component.