Optical trapping in 1D mesoscopic photonic crystal microcavities

We propose a novel approach in optical trapping exploiting mesoscopic photonic crystal microcavities. Full light confinement in mesoscopic photonic crystal membranes, forming a mesoscopic self-collimating 1D Fabry-Pérot cavity, was theoretically predicted and experimentally verified by the authors in previous papers. In this paper, we numerically demonstrate a high performance MPhC microcavity for optical trapping of fine particulate matter in air. The MPhC cavity has been simulated by 3D FDTD simulations while the trapping potential has been evaluated by means of the gradient force density convolution method. We numerically show that it is possible to obtain very high trapping potential for polystyrene particles having radii as small as 245 nm.