Abstract
We investigated localized surface plasmons (LSPs) for such applications as highly sensitive spectroscopies and the enhancement of photochemical reactions. These applications are enabled by the enhancement effect of an incident resonant electromagnetic field on the surfaces of noble metallic nanostructures. In particular, the application of LSP has recently attracted much attention for the effective optical trapping of nanoparticles instead of conventional optical tweezers; this is known as LSP-based optical trapping (LSP-OT). We demonstrated that LSP-OT was achieved not only for nanoparticles but also for such smaller molecules as polymer chains and DNA. In this paper, we reviewed the recent studies on LSP-OT.
