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Arrays of metallic nanostructures allow chiral biomolecules to be detected and characterized with increased sensitivity.

Optical tweezers use the forces exerted by light to manipulate objects at the micrometre scale. An approach in which the target particle itself plays an active part now achieves this using a lower light intensity. This reduction means that heat-sensitive targets such as viruses could be manipulated directly.

The authors demonstrate deterministic control of optical forces on a metasurface integrated with a suspended silicon nanomembrane. By tailoring multipolar mode interference, they realize both attractive and repulsive forces in a phase-controlled standing wave, experimentally validated, paving the way for advanced optical manipulation in nanoscale optomechanics.

A room-temperature motion sensor with record sensitivity is created using a levitating silica nanoparticle. Feedback cooling to reduce the noise arising from Brownian motion enables a detector that is perhaps even sensitive enough to detect non-Newtonian gravity-like forces.

A vacuum-trapped nanoparticle can be used to study experimentally the fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities in non-equilibrium nanoscale systems.

The intensity of optically-pumped fluorescence generated from a single atomic defect in diamond can be reduced by 80% in just 100 ns by applying infrared laser light. This result demonstrates the possibility of using these so-called nitrogen–vacancy centres to create optical switches that operate at room temperature.

Nano-mechanical resonators improve with high-Q factor and light mass, but this leads to the onset of nonlinear behaviour. Here the authors demonstrate precise control of the non-linear and bistable dynamics of a levitated nanoparticle in vacuum, using it as model system to study stochastic bistable phenomena.

A fluidic system with spatially reconfigurable hot spots generated by optical pumping of plasmonic nanorods is demonstrated, creating virtual barriers by generating local heating via photothermal conversion, for potential applications in chemical synthesis, lab-on-chip devices and microbiology.

By tailoring the anisotropy of light scattering along the surface of a macroscopic flat object, mechanical stabilization can be achieved without focused incident light or excessive constraints on the shape, size or material composition of the object.

A wide-field microscope capable of simultaneously measuring circular dichroism and circular birefringence signals over wide fields of view of the order of hundreds of micrometres is demonstrated, addressing the challenge of spatially resolving chiral heterogeneity in materials and biomolecules.

The confined surface plasmon-polariton modes in plasmonic waveguides are a promising platform for single-photon manipulation in small, coplanar architectures. Here, Bermúdez Ureñaet al. demonstrate efficient coupling of a single quantum emitter to the supported modes of a V-groove plasmonic waveguide.

Using microheaters and a genetic algorithm optimization, deterministic phase-front shaping through a planar thermo-optical module can be realized, complementing the existing optical shaping toolbox by offering low-chromatic-aberration, polarization-insensitive and transmission-mode components.

The influence of damping on the transition rate of a bistable system has been measured with an optically levitated nanoparticle.

A single nitrogen-vacancy centre in a diamond nanocrystal can be trapped by optical tweezers and manipulated in all spatial directions.

By combining fibre-based trapping and position detection with cold damping through planar electrodes, cooling of a silica nanoparticle particle motion to a few hundred phonons on a chip is achieved.

Biosensing tools to detect multiple analytes in a high-throughput manner are still hindered by many limitations. Here, the authors present a label-free optofluidic platform integrating digital holography and microfluidics for analyte detection, allowing for the fingerprinting of heterogenous biological samples.

A levitated nanoparticle in an optical cavity has been cooled to its motional ground state in two degrees of freedom at the same time. Control of the cavity properties also enabled the observation of the transition from 1D to 2D ground-state cooling.

Nanoantennas provide improvements in detection and fluorescence of nanoscale objects, which are usually limited to electric dipole radiation. By exploiting coupling to nanowire antennas, Curto et al. show controlled multipolar emission of a quantum dot, offering a novel multipolar photon source.

Reaching the strong coupling regime is a crucial step towards room-temperature quantum control with mesoscopic objects. Here, the authors use coherent scattering to demonstrate room temperature strong coupling between a levitated silica particle and a high-finesse optical cavity.

Objects as small as 50 nm can be manipulated in three dimensions with near-field-based optical tweezers.

Thermoplasmonics is based on the use of plasmonic nanoparticles as sources of heat remotely controlled by light. This Review discusses its current applications and challenges in a broad range of scientific fields, from nanomedicine to hot-electron chemistry and nanofluidics.