ABSTRACT
It is known that light exerts a pressure on an illuminated object. This light pressure was „rst predicted by Maxwell based on the Maxwell equation. Lebedev experimentally con„rmed the existence of light pressure in 1901 [1]. After that, there were no signi„cant studies on light pressure until 1970 when Ashkin demonstrated experimentally optical acceleration and trapping of dielectric particles with diameters in the range 0.59-2.68 μm [2]. A particle could be stably trapped within the focal spots of two counter-propagating laser beams. In 1978, it was experimentally demonstrated that nanoparticles can be trapped even by a single beam if the beam was tightly focused. Such the technique is known as optical tweezers [3].
