Optical tweezer application with Autofocusing Airy-Bessel beams*

We proposed a new autofocusing beams named autofocusing Airy-Bessel beams (AABB). Compared with traditional circular autofocusing beams (CAB), autofocusing Airy-Bessel beams exhibited a shorter autofocusing propagation distance and two times stronger peak intensity at the focusing point. We adopted this new kind of autofocusing beams as an optical tweezer to trap particles and red blood cells. This kind of optical tweezer presented a larger trapping stiffness, which corresponded a stronger trapping force as compared with conventional autofocusing beams. In other words, it could reduce the photodamage on sample especially some biological sample such as different kind of cells at realizing a same trapping. Generally, the trapping ability of this kind of optical tweezer was found to be proportion to the laser power. This new type of tweezer may find new applications in optical manipulation and biomedical research.