Bessel beams are laser beams whose shape gives them nondiffracting and self-healing properties. They find use in applications requiring a narrow laser beam with a high depth of field. The first part of this thesis presents the study of a new adaptive optical element capable of generating rapidly tunable Bessel beams: the tunable acoustic gradient index (TAG) lens. This device uses piezoelectrically-generated acoustic waves to modulate a fluid's density and refractive index, leading to electrically controllable lensing behavior. Both modeling and experiment are used to explain the observed multiscale Bessel beams. Because the TAG lens operates at frequencies of hundreds of kilohertz, the effective Bessel beam cone angle continuously varies at timescales on the order of microseconds or smaller-orders of magnitude faster than other existing technologies. In addition, the TAG lens may be driven with a Fourier superposition of multiple frequencies, which could enable the generation of arbitrary patterns.;The second part of this thesis presents the application of Bessel beams in a new probe-based direct-write optical nanolithography method called optical trap assisted nanolithography (OTAN). When compared to alternative techniques, OTAN makes probe placement and parallelization easier. The method uses Bessel beam optical tweezers to trap dielectric microspheres in close proximity to a surface. These microspheres are then illuminated with pulses from a second laser beam, whose fluence is enhanced directly below the microsphere by focusing and near-field effects to a level great enough to modify the substrate. This technique is used to produce 100 nm features, which are less than lambda/3, and whose sizes agree well with finite-difference time-domain models of the experiment. A demonstration is given of how the technique can be parallelized by trapping multiple microspheres with multiple beams and exposing all spheres in unison with a single pulsed beam. Finally, modeling and experimental measurements of the trapping and colloidal forces in the system that limit positional accuracy are presented.
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