NASA\u2019s holiday wish list includes tractor beams \u2013 not to haul a planet or drag massive space ships a la Star Wars but to collect particle dust from Mars or asteroids.<\/p>\n
A team at the University of Central Florida is among a few others that have been studying this \u201cscience fiction\u201d idea and trying to turn tractor beams into a reality \u2013 at least on a microscopic level.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been studying similar problems for many years,\u201d said Aristide Dogariu, a professor at CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics, a recognized world leader in laser research. \u201cThis is what we do in our field. Tractor beams in space …\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that\u2019s likely, at least not in the near future. But we have managed quite a bit at microscopic levels.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dogariu and his team have spent the past several years studying properties of light to understand how small objects can be manipulated. Small pieces of matter can be dragged around with tightly focused beams of light. This is a tool researchers are already using to investigate how diseases work on a cellular level.<\/p>\n
Small particles can be pushed in the direction of light flow simply by optical pressure, a fact that has been known for a long time. But accelerating particles against the stream of light is mind-boggling, and it has always fascinated scientists.<\/p>\n
The CREOL team, which included UCF research scientist Sergey Sukhov, has designed a method to construct \u201cartificial lenses,\u201d which can tailor beams of light such that objects of any shape can be pulled or moved in any direction at will.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo pull and move arbitrary particles could have intriguing possibilities,\u201d Dogariu said, adding that one example involves giving medical researchers more tools to figure out how to prevent and attack some of the most challenging diseases.<\/p>\n
For a fun read about recently published works on tractor beams, click here<\/a> . \u00a0Here\u2019s a link<\/a>\u00a0 <\/a>to the actual report of UCF\u2019s team in Phys. Rev. Lett. and an update on all the teams working on tractor beams around the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s holiday wish list includes tractor beams \u2013 not to haul a planet or drag massive space ships a la Star Wars but to collect particle dust from Mars or asteroids. A team at the University of Central Florida is among a few others that have been studying this \u201cscience fiction\u201d idea and trying to turn tractor beams into a…","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":30973,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"template-twocol.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"lazy_load_responsive_images_disabled":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[6395,981,1112,14916,6396,4361],"tu_author":[],"class_list":["post-30955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-technology","tag-aristide-dogariu","tag-college-of-optics-and-photonics","tag-creol","tag-research","tag-sergey-sukhov","tag-space"],"yoast_head":"\n