Rigorous analysis of optical forces between two dielectric planar waveguides immersed in dielectric fluid media

Janderson R. Rodrigues, Vilson R. Almeida

This work presents a rigorous analysis of optical forces between planar waveguides immersed in an arbitrary background medium. This approach exploits the Minkowski stress tensor formulation, which is compared with a normalized version of the dispersion relation method, showing excellent results agreement for different dielectric fluid media. Due to slot-waveguide effect, optical forces from TM modes are more sensitive to changes in the fluid refractive index than the TE counterparts. Furthermore, the repulsive optical force from the antisymmetric TM1 mode becomes stronger for higher refractive indexes, whereas the attractive force of the symmetric TM0 mode becomes weaker. The methodology and results presented in this work provide a rigorous analysis of nano-optomechanical devices actuated by optical forces in a broad range of materials and applications. Therefore, this study may impact areas of light-induced interactions presenting novel optofluidic and optomechanical functionalities, thus finding applications in nanoscale transport,

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