Update on temporal trapping and holographic printer

Optical trapping of absorbing particles in air is a powerful platform for contact-free manipulation, yet robustly confining metallic particles remains challenging due to strong radiometric and photophoretic forces that favor intensity minima and can promote hopping in multi-locus traps. We report a dynamically generated photophoretic “boat” trap formed by acousto-optic beam scanning that directly draws parabolic sidewalls in real time. The resulting open-top geometry provides a wide capture region while funneling particles toward a single deterministic trapping site. We summarize the trap concept, practical operating regime (power and draw-frequency constraints), and representative trapping behavior for conductor-coated microspheres used for visualization and for solid gold microparticles used as plasmonic targets. This approach provides a reconfigurable pathway toward stable positioning of metallic particles in air for interaction studies and levitated photonics experiments.