Engineering Optical Forces in Waveguides and Cavities Based on Optical Response

We present a new treatment of optical forces, revealing that the forces in virtually all optomechanically variable systems can be computed exactly and simply from only the optical phase and amplitude response of the system. This treatment, termed the response theory of optical forces (or RTOF), provides conceptual clarity to the essential physics of optomechanical systems, which computationally intensive Maxwell stress-tensor analyses leave obscured, enabling the construction simple models with which optical forces and trapping potentials can be synthesized based on the optical response of optomechanical systems.