Low-Power Optical Traps using Anisotropic Metasurfaces: Asymmetric Potential Barriers and Broadband Response

Abstract

We propose the optical trapping of Rayleigh particles using tailored anisotropic and hyperbolic metasurfaces illuminated with a linearly polarized Gaussian beam. This platform permits to engineer optical traps at the beam axis with a response governed by nonconservative and giant recoil forces coming from the directional excitation of ultra-confined surface plasmons during the light scattering process. Compared to optical traps set over bulk metals, the proposed traps are broadband in the sense that can be set with beams oscillating at any frequency within the wide range in which the metasurface supports surface plasmons. Over that range, the metasurface evolves from an anisotropic elliptic to a hyperbolic regime through a topological transition and enables optical traps with distinctive spatially asymmetric potential distribution, local potential barriers arising from the momentum imbalance of the excited plasmons, and an enhanced potential depth that permits the stable trapping of nanoparticles using low-intensity laser beams. To investigate the performance of this platform, we develop a rigorous formalism based on the Lorentz force within the Rayleigh approximation combined with anisotropic Green's functions and calculate the trapping potential of nonconservative forces using the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition method. Tailored anisotropic and hyperbolic metasurfaces, commonly implemented by nanostructuring thin metallic layers, enables using low-intensity laser sources operating in the visible or the IR to trap and manipulate particles at the nanoscale, and may enable a wide range of applications in bioengineering, physics, and chemistry.