Abstract

Recently, dielectric particles of ellipsoidal shapes have been observed to undergo sustained oscillations driven by laser radiation pressure (RP) forces and torques. We show that these oscillations, which are a direct consequence of the non conservative character of RP forces, can be suppressed in a 2-beam geometry by tuning the power ratio of the two counter-propagating beams. We offer both an experimental investigation and numerical calculations based on a simple ray-optics model.

© 2015 Optical Society of America