Non diffractive beam configurations for optical trapping

Over the past decade there has been rising interest in the class of nondiffracting light beams and structured light fields. Structured light fields have increased relevance in optical trapping, manipulation and organization. Non-diffracting beams feature a significantly increased Rayleigh length and thus are suitable for optical potentials that are extended along the beam axis. Till now a variety of different optical non-diffractive beams and optical fields carrying orbital angular momentum have been investigated. This covers Laguerre–Gaussian beams, Bessel or Bessel-Gauss beams, Airy and Matthieu beams, which can carry an optical angular momentum of ℓħ per photon and have an azimuthal angular dependence of exp(inϕ), where ℓ denotes the index for the unbounded azimuthal mode and ϕ is the azimuthal angle