In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of our work on optical control of light beams or particles with intelligently designed photonic lattices or nonconventional optical beams. I will then focus on presenting our recent work on optical trapping and manipulation with specially designed optical beams, including particle trapping and rotation with optical propelling beams, trapping and transporting of airborne particles with optical bottle beams, optical control and manipulation with self-accelerating and auto-focusing Airy beams, and self-trapping and self-induced transparency in nonlinear colloidal nanosuspensions.
Zhigang Chen is currently a professor at San Francisco State University. After he earned his Ph.D. degree from Bryn Mawr College, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow, and then a senior research staff member at Princeton University. Since joining San Francisco State University in 1998, his research and scholarly work has been centered on basic developments and discoveries in the field of nonlinear optics and photonics. He has published over 200 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings, including those in Science, PRL and PNAS, and he has edited a book and co-authored several invited book chapters. His work received over 3500 citations in literature, and has been presented at numerous conferences and workshops as plenary and invited talks. Dr. Chen is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.