Whispering gallery mode enhanced optical force with resonant tunneling excitation in the Kretschmann geometry.

The boundary element method is applied to investigate the optical forces when whispering gallery modes (WGMs) are excited by a total internally reflected wave. Such evanescent wave is particularly effective in exciting the high-Q WGM, while the low angular or high radial order modes are suppressed relatively. This results in a large contrast between the forces on and off resonance, and thus allows for high size selectivity. We fully incorporate the prism-particle interaction and found that the optical force behaves differently at different separations. Optimal separation is found, which corresponds to a compromise between intensity and Q factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]