Giant Enhanced Diffusion of Gold Nanoparticles in Optical Vortex Fields

Silvia Albaladejo, Manuel I. Marqués, Frank Scheffold and Juan Jose Saenz

We study the diffusion of a metal nanoparticle in the nonconservative force field of an optical vertex lattice. Radiation in the vortex array is shown to induce a giant enhancement over the free thermal diffusion. Langevin dynamics simulations show that the diffusion coefficient of (50 nm radius) gold particles at room temperature is enhanced by 2 orders of magnitude at power densities of the order or smaller than those used to trap nanoparticles with optical tweezers.

DOI