Experimental demonstration of optical transport, sorting and selfarrangement using a “tractor beam”

We demonstrate experimentally the principle of a "tractor beam" where a microobject is pulled against the photons flow. We show that this geometry and method can be used to delivery several microparticles over a distance of tens of micrometers, to sorting of particles according to their sizes using rotation of beam polarization, and to self-arrangement of microobjects to optically bound microstructures that are pulled againts the beam propagation.