Near-field optical tweezers on a chip based on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform have drawn significant attention as prominent particle manipulation tools in chemistry, biology, and materials science. In this work, we demonstrate a lowloss tapered silicon waveguide with a high intensity gradient to trap microparticles. The high transmittance of this waveguide makes it easy to cascade many traps along the direction of light propagation. Optical forces in all three dimensions are analyzed using an in-house modeling toolkit. Experimentally, an integrated waveguide-based optical tweezer with a cascade of five trapping units is fabricated by electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching. Yeast cells are successfully trapped at different trapping units in the cascaded tapered waveguide using only around 20 mW of optical power at 1550-nm wavelength. We believe that the proposed scheme exhibits great potential for applications in biological analysis and optical detection.
On-chip photonic devices are promising for large-scale optical trapping and parallel particle manipulation. Based on a waveguide grating, which can convert light from a localized optical mode to a freely propagating radiation beam, we propose two waveguide-grating-based optical tweezers for trapping micro- and sub-micro-particles. By optimizing the structural parameters of the etched trenches on the waveguide, the intensity distribution of the upward diffraction beam out of the grating is altered to approximate a target beam that can produce large gradient forces. The optimization method generates a focused quasi-Gaussian beam with a waist height of 7 μm above the grating and a beam with quasi-spherical wave wavefronts at ± 20°. The optimized upward radiation beams generate gradient forces up to hundreds of pN/W, which is strong enough for trapping microparticles with a trapping range as high as 20 μm. Besides, the proposed tweezer shows a possibility of trapping sub-micron particles and the potential for large-scale parallel particle manipulation.
Grating couplers are one of the building blocks in silicon (Si) photonics. A lithium niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) platform has a wide transparency window, an exceptional electro-optic performance, and a favorable mechanical property. Here we propose a grating coupler on the LNOI platform for an optical fiber to an ultra-low-loss silicon nitride (Si3N4) waveguide. Titanium dioxide (TiO2) has a negative thermo-optic coefficient and can be used to compensate the temperature drift of cores with positive thermo-optic coefficients. Here, a TiO2 layer on the high-aspect-ratio Si3N4 core is used for the athermal operation. The fundamental TE mode at a wavelength of 1550 nm is used as an input from the ultra-low-loss waveguide. We achieve a high directionality of 68% at the fixed wavelength. A coupling efficiency of 48% can be obtained. A 3-dB bandwidth of 60 nm from 1520 to 1580 nm is presented by the proposed grating coupler.
We propose an on-chip photonic tweezer to trap particles based on the photonic antenna for the first time. The proposed antenna, composed of some etched trenches on a waveguide, can produce a quasi-spherical-wave beam above the antenna. The beam is demonstrated to have a large gradient for generating gradient forces, which are up to hundreds of pN/W in this work and large enough for microparticle trapping. In addition, the particles far away from the top surface of the antenna, as high as 25 μm, are demonstrated to be trapped by the proposed tweezer. Furthermore, the proposed antenna tweezer shows the possibility of trapping sub-micron particles and the excellent tolerance for fabrication errors. This photonicantenna- based optical tweezer is considered to pave the way for developing fully integrated photonic circuits capable of large-scale parallel particle manipulation.
As one of the fundamental phenomena in optics, reflection always occurs for the refractive index contrast between different materials for the impedance mismatch. In many applications, such as solar cells or photodetectors, reflection is unwanted and the reduction of reflection is highly desirable. Metasurfaces have attracted intensive attention recently for their ability to efficiently reshape electromagnetic waves in desired manners on a flat and ultrathin platform. Numerous new concepts, effects, and applications have been intensely studied in recent years. As some of the most important applications, metasurfaces exhibit superior capabilities to enhance absorption, antireflection, and transmission. Here we demonstrate a silicon metasurface with significantly enhanced antireflection over a broad spectrum from 1 to 5 μm. Over the more than two-octaves bandwidth, the transmittance is all above 78% with an average value as high as 95%. The proposed metasurface is a silicon layer on top of an InAs layer on a GaSb substrate and exhibits polarization-insensitive transmission enhancement for the symmetry of the geometry. This structure can be potentially used for thermal targets detection, imaging, sensing, and biochemical analyses.
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