Bright Idea: New "Tractor Beam" Proposal Relies on Light's Negative Radiation Pressure

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A layered design would split two key aspects of a light wave, enabling electromagnetic energy to pull objects

By Evelyn Lamb ?| June 20, 2012

LIGHT'S POWER A new "tractor beam" proposal would harness the energy of light. Image: Flickr/alanymchan

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Tractor beams, a staple of science fiction, may be moving closer to science fact. In a paper published earlier this spring, physicists have proposed a structure that may enable light to pull objects.

Normally, light pushes on objects, albeit weakly. In the field of optical manipulation optical tweezers employ this pushing force to move microscopic objects from atoms to bacteria. The ability to pull as well would increase the precision and scope of optical manipulation. For spaceflight, engineers have proposed sails to capture the force exerted by light.

Rather than towing space vessels, the newly proposed tractor beam might be more useful in biology or medicine. "If you want to pull something towards you, you just reduce the pressure," says Mordechai Segev, a physicist at Technion?Israel Institute of Technology, who describes his team's idea in an April Optics Express paper. "You make a little bit of vacuum," he adds. The problem is that in sensitive medical applications, such as lung surgery, it is important not to change the pressure or introduce any new gases. "Here, the light will be the suction device," he says, "so the pressure would not change at all. It is just the light."

Previous ideas for a "tractor beam" have often focused on creating new gravitational fields to drag objects, heating air to create pressure differences or inducing electric and magnetic charges in objects so that they move against the direction of an incoming laser beam.

The latest proposal takes advantage of a phenomenon called negative radiation pressure. Russian physicist Victor Veselago first theorized its existence in his 1967 paper about materials with an unusual property called negative refraction index. An index of refraction is a number that describes the way light is bent when it goes into a glass lens or other medium, and at the time of the paper nobody knew if this number could be negative in any material. But in the past couple of decades several teams of researchers proved that negative refraction can occur in specially made substances called metamaterials, which have led to limited invisibility cloaks and distortion-free "super" lenses.

The mechanism of negative radiation pressure depends on two aspects of a light wave: its group and phase velocities. A light wave consists groups of smaller waves; the group velocity is the speed and direction of the overall wave group, the phase velocity refers to the speed and direction of a point on one of the smaller constituent waves. The electromagnetic energy of the light wave goes in the direction of the group velocity whereas the wave's effect on a particle goes in the direction of the phase velocity. If these two velocities point in different directions, then negative radiation pressure can result.

The use of metamaterials to move particles via negative radiation pressure has been hindered by the fact that most of these materials are solid, and introducing a gap for particles would eliminate the negative radiation pressure. Additionally, all current metamaterials contain metals, which absorb electromagnetic energy, rendering the pulling effect on particles negligible.

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