Single fiber optical trapping of a liquid droplet and its application in microresonator

• We perform the fiber optical trapping of an oil droplet and investigate its WGM resonance characteristics.
• Due to the simple construction and flexible control, the fiber liquid droplets manipulation has great application potential in many researching fields.

We propose and demonstrate an optical trapping of a liquid droplet and its application based on an annular core microstructured optical fiber. We grind and polish the annular core fiber tip to be a special frustum cone shape to make sure the optical force large enough to trap the liquid droplet non-intrusively. The axial and transverse optical trapping forces are simulated. In addition, we investigate the whispering gallery modes resonance characteristic of the trapped liquid droplet as the example of applications. The whispering gallery modes spectrum is sensitive to the size of the micro liquid droplet. Due to the simple construction and flexible manipulation, the fiber-based optical trapping technology for micro liquid droplets trapping, manipulating, and controlling has great application penitential in many fields, such as physics, biology, and interdisciplinary studies.