A vector holographic optical trap.

The invention of optical tweezers almost forty years ago has triggered applications spanning multiple disciplines and has also found its way into commercial products. A major breakthrough came with the invention of holographic optical tweezers (HOTs), allowing simultaneous manipulation of many particles, traditionally done with arrays of scalar beams. Here we demonstrate a vector HOT with arrays of digitally controlled Higher-Order Poincaré Sphere (HOPS) beams. We employ a simple set-up using a spatial light modulator and show that each beam in the array can be manipulated independently and set to an arbitrary HOPS state, including replicating traditional scalar beam HOTs. We demonstrate trapping and tweezing with customized arrays of HOPS beams comprising scalar orbital angular momentum and cylindrical vector beams, including radially and azimuthally polarized beams simultaneously in the same trap. Our approach is general enough to be easily extended to arbitrary vector beams, could be implemented with fast refresh rates and will be of interest to the structured light and optical manipulation communities alike.