Strong optical force acting on a dipolar particle over a multilayer substrate

Abstract: Optical forces acting on nano-sized particles are typically too small to be useful for particle manipulation. We theoretically and numerically demonstrate a mechanism that can significantly enhance the optical force acting on a small particle through a special type of resonant particle-substrate coupling. The resonance arises from the singular behavior of the particle's effective polarizablity in the presence of a metal-dielectric-metal multilayer substrate. We show that this phenomenon is closely related to the existence of a flat-band plasmon mode supported by the multilayer substrate.