LAUSR

Strong plasmonic focal spots, excited by radially polarized light on a smooth thin metallic film, have been widely applied to trap various micro- and nano-sized objects. However, the direct transmission part of the incident light leads to the scattering force exerted on trapped particles, which seriously affects the stability of the plasmonic trap. Here we employ a novel perfect radially polarized beam to solve this problem. Both theoretical and experimental results verify that such a beam could strongly suppress the directly transmitted light to reduce the piconewton scattering force, and an enhanced plasmonic trapping stiffness that is 2.6 times higher is achieved in experiments. The present work opens up new opportunities for a variety of research requiring the stable manipulations of particles.