Enhanced optical confinement of dye-doped dielectric nanoparticles using a picosecond-pulsed near-infrared laser

Abstract

We demonstrate a novel strategy to increase the capability of confining numerous dye-doped polymeric nanobeads (diameter 100 nm) with laser trapping. Unlike most classical works of optical trapping that address mainly the stiffness of the optical trap, our work concerns an increase in the number of particles confined near the laser focus. We developed an imaging system of light scattering in which a condenser lamp was employed to illuminate the focal plane of the objective lens, and the scattering of the incoherent light was specifically measured to determine the number of confined nanobeads. In contrast to preceding work that used mainly continuous-wave or femtosecond-pulsed lasers, we employed a picosecond-pulsed laser with the half-wavelength of the laser particularly falling within the absorption band of the dopant. Our results show that the number of doped nanobeads held by the laser is significantly greater than that of the bare nanobeads of the same dimension. In striking contrast, the confinement of the nanobeads of the two types was comparable when a continuous-wave laser of the same wavelength and power was employed. The number of confined dye-doped nanobeads increased nonlinearly with the power of the pulsed laser; this dependence was fitted satisfactorily with a second-order polynomial. Supported by theoretical analysis, we attribute the enhanced confinement of doped nanobeads in part to an increased effective refractive index resulting from two-photon resonance between the optical field of the laser and the dopant of the nanobead. We envisage that our findings would evoke applications that benefit from controlled confinement or aggregation of nanomaterials with the employment of near-infrared pulsed lasers.