Patent 7491928 was granted and assigned to New York University on February, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method and system for establishing extended optical traps for commercial use. The method and system employs a diffractive optical element (DOE) to process a light beam wherein the DOE includes phase information and amplitude information to create the extended optical trap. Such extended traps can be line traps and can be further expanded to two and three dimensional configurations.