Twin-core fiber optical tweezers

We present an abruptly tapered twin-core fiber optical tweezers, which is fabricated by fusing and drawing the twin-core fiber. In the twin-core fiber, the two beams are guided by the tapered fiber. At the end of the fiber tip, a larger converge angle between the two beams are made due to the abrupt tapered shape, which is formed a fast divergent optical field. The microscopic particle trapping performance of this special designed tapered twin-core fiber tip is investigated. The functionality of the proposed novel twin-core fiber optical tweezers is extended since an in-fiber integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer has been used to control orientation of the trapped particle. The distribution of the optical field emerging from the tapered fiber tip is simulated based on the beam propagation method (BPM). By using this two-beam combination technique, a strong enough gradient forces well is obtained for microscopic particles trapping in three dimensions. The abruptly tapered twin-core fiber optical tweezers is rigid and easy to handle, especially useful for building up a multi-tweezers system for trapping and manipulating micro-scale particles.