Speckle Optical Tweezers: Principles, Implementations and Applications in High-Throughput Micro- and Nanoparticle Manipulation

Optical tweezers (OTs) serve as a core contactless manipulation tool at the micro- and nano-scale, with wide applications in physics, biology, colloid science and other fields. However, conventional single-beam gradient force OTs are limited by diffraction, optical damage, low throughput, and system complexity. To meet the demand for large-scale particle manipulation in complex environments, speckle optical tweezers (SOTs) based on random optical fields have emerged as a promising alternative to conventional OTs that transform random speckle patterns into a controllable manipulation resource. Since their formal establishment, SOTs have developed a solid theoretical foundation and diverse implementation platforms with key breakthroughs in micro- and nanoparticle manipulation. This paper systematically reviews the origin and development of SOTs, elaborates their core principles, summarizes the statistical properties of speckle fields, and introduces typical configurations based on random media, multimode fibers, and spatial light modulators. It also highlights the unique value of SOTs in micro- and nanoparticle manipulation, active particle dynamics, and cold atom physics, with advantages of high throughput, low cost, and environmental adaptability. Finally, future development trends are discussed, including intelligent regulation of optical fields, interdisciplinary applications, system miniaturization and multi-technology integration. This review provides a comprehensive reference for the theoretical development, system optimization, and practical application of SOTs in fields such as statistical physics, biomedicine, microfluidics, and quantum science.