Within recent years, optical micromanipulation has opened a broad field of applications in biomechanics, microrheology and nanoparticle assembly. In these fields, a highly desired action is sorting of the objects under consideration by their size. In this contribution, we employ Laguerre-Gaussian beams with helical phase fronts as trapping potential for dielectric particles and investigate the dynamics and size-dependent assembly of silica microspheres, induced by light-matter interactions. We demonstrate both experimentally and numerically, that by adjusting the parameters of the tailored trapping potential, spatial segregation of particles by size is possible.
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