Abstract
Recent theoretical and experimental studies have shed light on how optical trapping dynamics under femtosecond pulsed excitation are fine-tuned by optical and thermal nonlinearities. Here, we present experimental results of nonlinear optical trapping of single and multiple polystyrene beads (of 1 μm diameter). We show how integration and synchronization of bright-filed video microscopy with confocal detection of backscatter provide both spatial and temporal resolution required to capture intricate details of trapping dynamics. Such spatiotemporal detection is promising to have far-reaching applications in exploring controlled optical trapping and manipulations harnessed by optical and thermal nonlinearities.