Optical guiding of aerosol droplets

Abstract

We characterize the ability of Gaussian and Bessel beams to guide water, ethanol and dodecane aerosol droplets. Droplets produced from a nebuliser source are trapped using radiation pressure and then by varying the beam power are controllably guided in a vertical direction. The use of a zeroth-order Bessel beam, which has a non-diffracting thin core, is shown to improve guiding distances over a comparable Gaussian beam by more than three times with guiding distances of up to 2.75mm for dodecane droplets. We discuss the applications for this work in the context of tools for optically manipulating airborne particles.