Tractor beams at metamaterial substrates

Abstract

Optical forces acting on nanoobjects can be enhanced, inverted or cancelled out by the presence of carefully chosen environment. Here we consider metamaterial substrate which can modify optical forces through the excitation of surface waves and volumetric hyperbolic modes. Both types of interaction channels will be discussed in the present work where we show new effect of pulling forces on subwavelength dielectric particles above multilayer hyperbolic substrates.