Recent Trends in Optical Manipulation Inspired by Mesoscale Photonics and Diffraction Optics

The spatial resolution of conventional optics, which is need for non-destructively trapping of microobjects, is limited by diffraction to nearly half the wavelength. Despite this limitation, the use of optical methods is one of the main directions in biological and biomedical researches, since only the use of optical methods has a minimal effect on living organisms. Quick progress in this field is based on a large extent on the development of new optical technologies and significant progress in the mesoscale photonics enabled the researches to obtain novel, previously unachievable information. Below we discussed some recent trends in optical manipulations on wavelength scale based on diffractive elements – mesoscale dielectric particles as a field localization object and classical diffractive optical elements with unusual properties.