Structured Light and Its Applications

Preface

It is difficult to over state the profoundly unexpected character of the properties that have recently emerged in connection with optical beams having complex structures, or indeed the astonishingly wide range of prospective applications for the noncontact optical manipulation of matter. Extending well beyond the established methods of focused laser trapping and tweezers, many of these methods offer new opportunities for subwavelength resolution nanooptics, with potential applications extending from biological cell handling, through microfluidics, nanofabrication and photonics, to laser cooling, atom trapping, quantum informatics and the control of Bose–Einstein condensates. Many of these new methods exploit the distinctive angular momentum, ...