FDTD simulation of trapping nanowires with linearly polarized and radially polarized optical tweezers

In this paper a model of the trapping force on nanowires is built by three dimensional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) and Maxwell stress tensor methods, and the tightly focused laser beam is expressed by spherical vector wave functions (VSWFs). The trapping capacities on nanoscale-diameter nanowires are discussed in terms of a strongly focused linearly polarized beam and radially polarized beam. Simulation results demonstrate that the radially polarized beam has higher trapping efficiency on nanowires with higher refractive indices than linearly polarized beam.