Highly Efficient Dual-Fiber Optical Trapping with 3D Printed Diffractive Fresnel Lenses

Highly efficient counter-propagating fiber-based optical traps are presented which utilize converging beams from fibers with 3D printed diffractive Fresnel lenses on their facet. The use of a converging beam instead of diverging beam in dual-fiber traps creates a strong trapping efficiency in both the axial and the transverse directions. Converging beams with a numerical aperture of up to 0.7 are produced by diffractive Fresnel lenses. These lenses also provide a large focal distance of up to 200 μm in a moderately high refractive index medium. Fabrication of such diffractive lenses with microsized features at the tip of a fiber is possible by femtosecond two photon lithography. In comparison to chemically etched fiber tips, the normalized trap stiffness of dual-fiber tweezers is increased by a substantial factor of 35–50 when using a converging beam produced by diffractive Fresnel lenses. The large focal length provided by these diffractive structures allows working at a large fiber-to-fiber distance, which leads to larger space and the freedom to combine other spectroscopy and analytical methods in combination with trapping.