I provide name of few majors papers in this regard, the 3rd one specifically determined when we can use which method etc.

1- Optical trapping by Neuman and Block

2-Lights, action: optical tweezers by Molloy and Padgett

3-Optical trapping and manipulation of plasmonic

nanoparticles: fundamentals, applications, and

perspectives by Urban

I hope these help you out.

You may wish to begin with the MIT open course on the subject [1]. Briefly, the MST method is exact insofar as the classical Maxwell equations can be viewed as exact and insofar as the relevant integrals can been evaluated exactly. In practice, in using the method based on the MST one has to be mindful of whether the adopted magnetic field vector is B (the magnetic flux) or H [2]; if H, then one should realise that the constitutive relation relating H to B can be non-trivial in an arbitrary medium (in contrast to vacuum, or air in practice).

[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-6-003-electromechanical-dynamics-spring-2009/part-ii/chap08_sec_emd.pdf

[2] Working with H is convenient as it is determined by the directly-measurable electric current that goes through the coil generating the magnetic field. Since in vacuum B = μ0 H, where μ0 is the vacuum permeability, in calculating the magnetic field in vacuum use of H, instead of B, offers no fundamental advantage.

As long as the objects are in vacuum/air, there is no problem to use MST to compute the optical forces. In fact, MST, Abraham, Minkowski, and Einstein-Laub tensors all give the same result of optical force.

However, when it comes to objects in a medium, different methods predict different results and there are issues such as how to separate field momentum and material momentum. As far as I know, there is no stress tensor that can predict forces which agree with all experimental results yet.

Here are several papers of mine and my collaborators discussing the applicability of different methods. We found that, in a medium, optical force actually depends on lattice symmetry of the microstructures, and radiation pressure on a surface can become radiation tension.

• "Electromagnetic stress at the boundary: Photon pressure or tension?", S. Wang, J. Ng, M. Xiao, and C.T. Chan, Science Advances 2, e1501485 (2016).
• "Analytic derivation of electrostrictive tensors and their application to optical force density calculations", W. Sun, S.B. Wang, J. Ng, L. Zhou, and C.T. Chan, Physical Review B 91, 235439 (2015).
• "Closed-form expressions for effective constitutive parameters: Electrostrictive and magnetostrictive tensors for bianisotropic metamaterials and their use in optical force density calculations", N. Wang, S. Wang, Z.Q. Zhang, and C.T. Chan, Physical Review B 98, 045426 (2018).
• "Electromagnetic stress tensor for an amorphous metamaterial medium", N. Wang, S. Wang, and J. Ng, Physical Review A 97, 033839 (2018).