Ultrafast Optical Tweezers: Manipulating Matter with Chirped-Pulse-Amplified Mid-IR Vortex Pulses

While optical tweezers have revolutionized manipulation at the micro/nanoscale (Asplund et al., 2019), they are typically limited by the CW or quasi-CW nature of the trapping beams and their interaction mechanisms. Building on the demonstration of intense, few-cycle, mid-IR pulses via OPCPA (Baudisch, 2017) and TW-scale vortex pulses (Pan et al., 2020), this research proposes using CPA-generated vortex pulses as the trapping/interaction field in optical tweezers systems. This approach could enable not only new forms of optical manipulation—leveraging strong-field, nonlinear, or even relativistic effects—but also real-time, ultrafast probing of molecular dynamics or structural changes in a tightly trapped object. This concept brings together the spatial selectivity of vortex beams (for angular momentum transfer) and the temporal precision of CPA pulses, potentially opening up manipulation and measurement regimes that are currently inaccessible. Such a synthesis is notably absent from existing reviews and experimental work, and could have wide-ranging implications in ultrafast biophysics, quantum optics, and nanotechnology.

References:

1. High power, high intensity few-cycle pulses in the mid-IR for strong-field experiments. M. Baudisch (2017).
2. The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics: optical tweezers and chirped pulse amplification. M. Asplund, Jeremy A. Johnson, J. Patterson (2019). Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry.
3. Generation of Terawatt-Scale Vortex Pulses Based on Optical Parametric Chirped-Pulse Amplification. W. Pan, X. Liang, Lianghong Yu, Aotian Wang, Jinfeng Li, Ruxin Li (2020). IEEE Photonics Journal.