  Optical tweezers and optical lattices are making it possible to control small
particles by means of electromagnetic forces and torques. In this context, a
method is presented in this work to calculate electromagnetic forces and
torques for arbitrarily-shaped objects in the presence of other objects
illuminated by a plane wave. The method is based upon an expansion of the
electromagnetic field in terms of multipoles around each object, which are in
turn used to derive forces and torques analytically. The calculation of
multipole coefficients are obtained numerically by means of the boundary
element method. Results are presented for both spherical and non-spherical
objects.
