Active, reactive and instantaneous optical forces on small particles in the time domain: Ultrafast attosecond subcycle pulses

TL;DR

This paper presents a theoretical study of ultrafast optical forces on small particles using attosecond pulses, revealing novel effects like lateral, pulling, and levitating forces, advancing the understanding of optical manipulation at ultrafast timescales.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework for analyzing instantaneous optical forces with subcycle attosecond pulses, uncovering new force effects on resonant dipolar particles.

Findings

Demonstration of lateral forces on electric dipoles

Identification of a pulling force against wavefield momenta

Prediction of levitation effects under pulse repetition

Abstract

Recently discovered reactive optical forces have nule time-average of their instantaneous values on monochromatic illumination, so that their detection suggests the use of ultrafast optics, specially in the femto and attosecond domains. By using illumination with subcycle attosecond evanescent pulses, we report a theoretical study of the time variations of instantaneous forces and the behaviour of reactive forces versus those active \bb on small resonant particles that we consider dipolar. We demonstrate how the structure of these pulses permit to obtain three remarkable novel effects on electric dipoles; namely, a lateral force, a pulling force against the canonical and Poynting momenta of the wavefield, and a levitating effect on the particle under repetition of the pulse. We expect that this study inaugurates a novel research in the area of optical manipulation. Future developments and experiments based on this theory should increase the insight and operation of the ultrafast dynamics of nanostructures.