Abstract

Diffraction limits the size of bright structures in a superposition of traveling waves to no smaller than approximately half the wavelength. One way to overcome this limit, and therefore to create smaller structures, is to use evanescent waves instead of traveling waves. This is important in fields such as optical trapping (e.g. [1]). So far, evanescent- wave fields that are superpositions of only a few "evanescent plane waves" have been used.

© 2007 IEEE