In a collaboration with our former Marie-Curie fellow Nicolas Bachelard from Bordeaux, we have just published a new article in Nature Communications. We show both theoretically and experimentally that tailoring the wavefront of the trapping light allows one to control optical scattering forces and significantly enhance the confinement of nanoparticles levitated in vacuum without increasing laser power. Our results challenge the conventional view of diffraction limited trapping and open new perspectives for optomechanics experiments approaching the quantum regime.
