Negative Optical Torque

Light carries angular momentum and as such it can exert torques on material objects. Applications of these opto-mechanical effects were limited initially due to their smallness in magnitude, but later becomes powerful and versatile after the invention of laser. Novel and practical approaches for harvesting light for particle rotation have since been demonstrated, where the structure is always subjected to a positive optical torque along a certain axis if the incident angular momentum has a positive projection on the same axis. We report here an interesting phenomenon of “negative optical torque”, meaning that incoming photons carrying angular momentum rotate an object in the opposite sense. Surprisingly this can be realized quite straightforwardly in simple planar structures. Field retardation is a necessary condition and discrete rotational symmetry of material object plays an important role. The optimal conditions are explored and explained.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Scientific Reports

• Publication date

  2014-02-04

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Physics, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/srep06386arXiv 1402.0621PMID 25226863PMCID 4165981
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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