Sorting by Periodic Potential Energy Landscapes: Optical Fractionation

Viscously damped objects driven through a periodically modulated potential energy landscape can become kinetically locked in to commensurate directions through the landscape, and thus can be deflected away from the driving direction. We demonstrate that the threshold for an object to become kinetically locked in to an array can depend exponentially on its size. When implemented with an array of holographic optical tweezers, this provides the basis for a continuous and continuously optimized sorting technique for mesoscopic objects called ``optical fractionation''.