Surface plasmon polaritons optical tweezers technology

As an important technology for capturing and manipulating micro- and nano-particles, the optical tweezers rely on the basic principle of the mechanical effect of the momentum transfer between light and matter. It provides a non-contacting technique with a high precision, and has been widely used in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine and other scientific frontier fields. In recent years, surface plasmon polaritons have brought a new break-through for the development of the optical tweezers technology due to their excellent features of the near-field enhancement and the breakthrough of the diffraction limit, and become a very important and international frontier research direction. The new optical tweezers technologies based on the surface plasmon polaritons could be divided into the structure-based and the all-optical modulated surface plasmon polaritons, and each has its own advantages on particle trapping precision, trapping region size, dynamic and degree of freedom of manipulation. These new surface plasmon polaritons optical tweezers technologies attract researchers all over the world to carry out a large number of theoretical research and experimental exploration, show unique advantages on the trapping of nanoparticles and metallic particles and the enhancement and control of the near field electromagnetic field, and prove promising applications in the fields of biological sensing, surface enhanced Raman scattering, etc.