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Microoptomechanical pumps assembled and driven by holographic optical vortex arrays

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Abstract

Beams of light with helical wavefronts can be focused into ring-like optical traps known as optical vortices. The orbital angular momentum carried by photons in helical modes can be transferred to trapped mesoscopic objects and thereby coupled to a surrounding fluid. We demonstrate that arrays of optical vortices created with the holographic optical tweezer technique can assemble colloidal spheres into dynamically reconfigurable microoptomechanical pumps assembled by optical gradient forces and actuated by photon orbital angular momentum.

©2004 Optical Society of America

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Figures (3)

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Creating a microfluidic pump from a beam of light. (a) Gray-scale representation of the phase hologram, φ(r⃗), encoding an optomechanical pump. The color bar translates gray-scale to phase shifts in radians. The inset is an expanded view near the singularity at the optical axis. (b) Focused image of the 3×2 optical vortex array projected by φ(r⃗). (c) The same optical vortex array after aberration correction. (d) (Movie 407 kB) Bright-field image of 800 nm diameter silica spheres trapped in the array of optimized optical vortices.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Time-lapse composite of 16 images in half-second intervals of colloidal spheres in the holographic pump at P=2.4 W. Circles identify the trajectory of a single sphere as it moves 25 µm to the left in 7 sec. Its peak speed is 5 µm/sec.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3. (a) Circulation rate in revolutions per minute (rpm) and (b) axial flow speed, as a function of laser power.

Equations (1)

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v ( r ) = v ( R ) ( R r ) 2
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