On chip shapeable optical tweezers

Particles manipulation with optical forces is known as optical tweezing. While tweezing in free space with laser beams was established in the 1980s, integrating the optical tweezers on a chip is a challenging task. Recent experiments with plasmonic nanoantennas, microring resonators, and photonic crystal nanocavities have demonstrated optical trapping. However, the optical field of a tweezer made of a single microscopic resonator cannot be shaped. So far, this prevents from optically driven micromanipulations. Here we propose an alternative approach where the shape of the optical trap can be tuned by the wavelength in coupled nanobeam cavities. Using these shapeable tweezers, we present micromanipulation of polystyrene microspheres trapped on a silicon chip. These results show that coupled nanobeam cavities are versatile building blocks for optical near-field engineering. They open the way to much complex integrated tweezers using networks of coupled nanobeam cavities for particles or bio-objects manipulation at a larger scale.