We use spin-orbit interaction (SOI) effects of light in tight focusing by optical tweezers to engineer the dynamics of birefringent microparticles at different spatial locations close to the focal region of the tweezers. Thus, we tightly focus radially and azimuthally polarized first order vortex (Laguerre-Gaussian) beams - that do not carry intrinsic orbital angular momentum (OAM) - into a refractive index stratified medium, and observe multiple birefringent particles orbiting around a single particle trapped stably at the beam center. This is due to the fact that tight focusing induces a longitudinal component of the electric field in the case of radial polarization, which completely modifies the intensity distribution, creating finite intensity at the center - which is typically dark for vortex beams. The intensity at the beam center and off-axis - in an annular ring - are both enhanced on introducing a refractive index stratified medium in the path of the optical tweezers, so that particles are trapped in both regions. In addition, the presence of the longitudinal component leads to an additional transverse spin angular momentum (TSAM) and extrinsic transverse orbital angular momentum (ETOAM). The latter causes single or multiple birefringent particles trapped in the annular ring to rotate around the beam axis, while a single particle is also trapped without displaying rotation or translation. This demonstrates the effectiveness of SOI in engineering the dynamics of mesoscopic particles in optical tweezers.
Spin-to-orbit conversion of light is a dynamical optical phenomenon in a non-paraxial fields, which plays an important role in various manifestations of the optical Hall Effect. Here, we demonstrate – both theoretically and experimentally – the rotational Hall Effect for a higher order Gaussian beam (HG10 ) in an optical tweezers configuration. Our theoretical results clearly reveal that for an input spin polarized HG10 mode (right/left circularly polarized), the orthogonal circularly polarized component (left/ right), generated due to angular momentum conservation following spin-orbit interaction, displays a large rotation of the intensity profile – a clear signature of the rotational Hall effect. We demonstrate the same experimentally, although the impossibility of separating out the longitudinal component from the detected intensity profile prevents us from obtaining rotation values as large as the theoretical predictions. We also measure the rotational shift as a function of the refractive index contrast in the beam path of the optical tweezers, and observe a proportional increase in general. We envisage interesting applications in inducing complex dynamics in optically trapped birefringent particles due to the spin-orbit conversion in our system.
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