Optical manipulation is of broad interest in physics, chemistry, and biology. In the literature, most of the studies are focused on the optical trapping on a single object. In this thesis, we investigated the light-induced interaction of a collection of particles. The light-induced interaction between small particles was studied by a hierarchy of methods including the dipole theory, the multiple scattering and Maxwell stress tensor formalism, and the finite-difference-time-domain method. We showed that the multiple scattering between small particles could induce a binding mechanism to stabilize optically organized structures, but at the same time induced an intrinsic unbinding mechanism. The stability of optically organized structure was studied and a concept of “optical density” was in...[ Read more ]

Optical manipulation is of broad interest in physics, chemistry, and biology. In the literature, most of the studies are focused on the optical trapping on a single object. In this thesis, we investigated the light-induced interaction of a collection of particles. The light-induced interaction between small particles was studied by a hierarchy of methods including the dipole theory, the multiple scattering and Maxwell stress tensor formalism, and the finite-difference-time-domain method. We showed that the multiple scattering between small particles could induce a binding mechanism to stabilize optically organized structures, but at the same time induced an intrinsic unbinding mechanism. The stability of optically organized structure was studied and a concept of “optical density” was introduced to gauge the destabilizing effect. We found that light-induced forces could bind dielectric spheres into extended structures through two mechanisms, each with its own length scale which could be adjusted by the configuration of the external light source. By manipulating the commensurability of the two length scales, these two mechanisms cooperated to bind a large number of spheres. When the two length scales became incommensurate for some particular incident angle, the competition between the two mechanisms led to modulated structures and other complex phenomena such as re-entrant stability. We searched for the possibility for stabilizing larger clusters. For this purpose, we found that circularly polarized light bound dielectric spheres into large-scale two-dimensional hexagonal lattice and multiple scattering also induced a rotation of optically bound structures. We searched for configurations that could induce optical trapping by field enhancement. Enhanced transmission on perforated metallic film system was studied. Surface modes bound on multi perforated perfect metal plate system were analytical solved and related to different high transmittance modes. Near-field enhancement was discovered on perforated area at high transmission frequency and potential optical manipulation approaches were demonstrated.