Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
Chiral Nanostructures Fabricated by
Twisted Light with Spin
Takashige Omatsu
a
and Ryuji Morita
b
a
Graduate School of Advanced Integration Science, Chiba University,
1-33, Yayoi-cho, Inage-ku, Chiba 263-8522, Japan
b
Department of Applied Physics, Hokkaido University, Kita-13, Nishi-8, Kita-ku,
Sapporo 060-8628, Japan
omatsu@faculty.chiba-u.jp
Optical vortices (twisted light), widely used in optical tweezers and
superresolution microscopes, exhibit wavefront helicity known as
orbital angularmomentum caused by aphase singularity.
We propose a new approach to next-generation materials
processing by employing vortex lasers. We demonstrated for the
first time that optical vortices can twist material to fabricate chiral
nanostructures. The constituent elements (melted or vaporized
material) of the irradiated material receive the helicity of optical
vortices, thereby forming chiral nanostructures.
Such chiral nanostructures with a tip curvature of less than
40 nm (less than 1/25th of the laser wavelength) will enable us to
provide new physical insight into laser-oriented materials science
including structured materials and metamaterials as well as novel
nanoscale imaging technologies for selective identification of the
chirality and optical activity of molecules and chemical composites.
