Gauthier R C, Ashman M, Grover C P
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario P3E 2C6, Canada.
Appl Opt. 1999 Aug 1;38(22):4861-9. doi: 10.1364/ao.38.004861.
A sophisticated modeling program was used recently to predict the trapping and the manipulation properties of elongated cylindrical objects in the focal region of a high-intensity laser beam. On the basis of the model, the cylinders should align their longest diagonal dimension with the propagation axis of the laser beam and follow the beam when it is displaced transverse to the cylinder's central axis. Experimental confirmation of the cylinder's behavior is presented and confirms the suitability of the enhanced ray-optics approach to modeling micrometer-scale objects in optical-trap environments.
