Light touch for particle manipulation

Research on optical trapping has won the Nobel prize in 1997, where the technique has been applied to atomics scale to cool the atom vapor at an unprecedentedly low temperature. Optical trapping has reached to other extreme to manipulate biological articles in recent years. Despite pioneering discovery in recent bio-physics, optical trapping still faces a fundamental problem: lack of universal methodology to expand optical manipulation in three dimensional macroscopic space. In this talk, principles and achievements of conventional optical trapping will be reviewed with an emphasis on the scientific and technical bottlenecks. Then the talk will cover recent attempts based on optical fibers, which may provide a breakthrough in 3D optical manipulation. Potential applications of the fiber optic tweezers are explored along with their scientific implications.