Optical trapping of the anisotropic crystal nanorod

Paul B. Bareil and Yunlong Sheng

We observed in the optical tweezers experiment that some anisotropic nanorod was stably trapped in an orientation tiled to the beam axis. We explain this trapping with the T-matrix calculation. As the vector spherical wave functions do not individually satisfy the anisotropic vector wave equation, we expand the incident and scattered fields in the isotropic buffer in terms of E→, and the internal field in the anisotropic nanoparticle in terms of D→, and use the boundary condition for the normal components of D→ to compute the T-matrix. We found that when the optical axes of an anisotropic nanorod are not aligned to the nanorod axis, the nanorod may be trapped stably at a tilted angle, under which the lateral torque equals to zero and the derivative of the torque is negative.

DOI