Numerical and experimental demonstrations of optical trapping and manipulation of a selective red blood cell using a photonic hook based on broken symmetry tapered fiber probe

Optical tweezers and trapping technologies have a crucial impact on scientific research by precisely manipulating mesoscale objects at wavelength scales. The development of simple fiber-based optical tweezers foreseeing sorting and manipulation of a single cell has been firstly encouraged by biomedical requirements. The ability to manipulate mesoscale objects with high flexibility and precision is essential for a wide class of different fields. The ability to precisely arrange cells into desired structures is important for numerous biomedical and physical applications. This study experimentally reports for the first time a simple and low-cost strategy to produce an optical fiber-based photonic hook for achieving new unprecedented functionalities to selective particle manipulation in a lab-on-tip platform. We show perspectives opened by combining the fields of structured light in the form of the photonic hook and optical manipulation method. This enables new applications for optical trapping setups based on structured fields in the form of the photonic hook produced by an optical fiber tip with broken symmetry, where it becomes possible to manipulate and sort cells selectively.