Proposed Optical Manipulation of Nanoparticles to Access and Select Emission Lines

Optical manipulation of nanomaterials using light resonant with material excitations holds promise for enhancing optical forces and sorting particles by unique quantum properties. Conventional resonant optical sorting mainly relies on absorption and scattering forces, making it difficult to sort nanomaterials by specific emission lines. Furthermore, emission typically induces negligible force unless the material is highly anisotropic, limiting selective manipulation via emission characteristics. To address this, we propose optical sorting of targeted emission lines by harnessing recoil forces under an inverted-occupation condition. Our theoretical evaluation of nanodiamonds (NDs) with a single-color center demonstrates the feasibility of sorting them by color-center-specific emission. These findings provide a pathway for ultrahigh concentrations of detonation NDs with single-color centers, opening avenues for advanced quantum technology and biosensing.