Massive Parallel Sorting of Particles Using Unwound Polygonal Vortex Beams

Frontiers in Physics

Greg Gbur¹  Hao Zhang²  Yangjian Cai²  Xiaofei Li³  Yuanmei Gao³  Yangsheng Yuan³ 

[1] Department of Physics and Optical Science, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, United States;School of Physical Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou, China;Shandong Provincial Engineering and Technical Center of Light Manipulation and Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optics and Photonic Devices, School of Physics and Electronics, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China;

关键词: optical vortex beam;    high-capacity particle sorting;    fractal theory;    optical sorting;    geometric transformation;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fphy.2022.877804

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Optical sorting, as one kind of optical tweezers, is used to separate mixed particles in a background environment. This unusual tool has a wide application prospect because the non-contact and non-destructive advantages ideally suit the pressing need of bio-technology. However, most sorting methods and devices have been accomplished based on real-time one-by-one sorting, which ignored the sorting efficiency and is not applicable to high-capacity particles. Although more and more structured light beams are proposed to enhance the sorting efficiency, it is still not enough for desired applications. Here, we propose a method for the massive parallel sorting of particles: polygonal optical vortex (OV) beams are unwound by a geometric transformation to produce linear OV beams with kinked distributions. This structured light is used to greatly enhance the sorting efficiency. We adopt the fractal theory to illustrate the increase of the region over which the beam can interact with particles. We demonstrate that the gradient force of this beam is large enough to manipulate spherical particles in the Rayleigh regime of scattering. These results introduce new possibilities for high-capacity particle sorting.

【 授权许可】

Unknown