{"id":235604,"date":"2026-04-20T22:30:58","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T03:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/generalized-optical-meta-spanners-empower-arbitrary-light-paths-for-multitasking-optical-manipulation"},"modified":"2026-04-20T22:30:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T03:30:58","slug":"generalized-optical-meta-spanners-empower-arbitrary-light-paths-for-multitasking-optical-manipulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/generalized-optical-meta-spanners-empower-arbitrary-light-paths-for-multitasking-optical-manipulation","title":{"rendered":"Generalized optical meta-spanners empower arbitrary light paths for multitasking optical manipulation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/generalized-optical-meta-spanners-empower-arbitrary-light-paths-for-multitasking-optical-manipulation2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Have you ever wished to drive microscopic matter along an arbitrarily tailored trajectory instead of just a circle? That\u2019s exactly what we set out to achieve.<\/p>\n<p>The field of photonic force manipulation has opened new avenues for controlling the microscopic world with light. Since the invention of optical tweezers in 1986, the non-contact trapping and manipulation of microscopic particles using the momentum and angular momentum of light has become an indispensable tool in biophysics, soft matter science, and micro-nanotechnology\u2014a contribution recognized by the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics.<\/p>\n<p>Conventional optical tweezers rely on the intensity gradient of a Gaussian beam to generate a three-dimensional restoring potential for stable particle trapping.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever wished to drive microscopic matter along an arbitrarily tailored trajectory instead of just a circle? That\u2019s exactly what we set out to achieve. The field of photonic force manipulation has opened new avenues for controlling the microscopic world with light. Since the invention of optical tweezers in 1986, the non-contact trapping and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nanotechnology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}