Microoptomechanical pumps assembled and driven by holographic optical vortex arrays

摘要

Beams of light with helical wavefronts can be focused into ring-like opticaltraps known as optical vortices. The orbital angular momentum carried byphotons in helical modes can be transferred to trapped mesoscopic objects andthereby coupled to a surrounding fluid. We demonstrate that arrays of opticalvortices created with the holographic optical tweezer technique can assemblecolloidal spheres into dynamically reconfigurable microoptomechanical pumpsassembled by optical gradient forces and actuated by photon orbital angularmomentum.