Optical trapping in air on a single interference fringe

Abstract

Stable and reproducible trapping in air of 1 µm and 500 nm dielectric particles has been realized using a dual beam optical fiber tweezers with cleaved commercial single mode fibers. The influence of the interference fringes of the two coherent and counter-propagating trapping beam is investigated by controlling the fringe visibility. Optical trapping on a series of upto10 fringes or trapping on only one to two fringes has been observed in distinct experiments. High axial trapping efficiencies of up to 1nN·µm⁻¹W⁻¹ is observed. The experimental results are supported by numerical simulations.