Optical micromanipulations in the non-diffractive regime

The ever-evolving topic of optical micromanipulation has established itself as a discipline over the last three decades, and is of much interest to a wide research community due to constantly emerging new applications across the various key disciplines. Performing optical manipulation using evanescent waves is termed near-field optical manipulation, which is essentially the manipulation of particles in the non-diffractive regime. The concept of the breaking of diffraction limit is the spur driving near-field optics studies, as opposed to all far field optical applications where light cannot be focused to a spot smaller than the diffraction limited value, which is about half the wavelength of light in the medium. The authors present a review of the various near-field optical manipulation techniques and then report on the observation of erythrocyte pearl chains by a near-field optical tweezer.