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Uncategorized Monday, October 22nd 2012 at 6:55 pm

Physicists Invent (Tiny) Working Tractor Beam, World Becomes Instantly More Awesome

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You guys, hold the phone. Drop whatever you’re doing right now. Is it dropped? Yes? Good. We have tractor beams now! Like where you zap a thing with a laser and pull it toward you with beam power? Yeah, those! We have those now. Even though they are super tiny and effective only on microscopic items like silica spheres suspended in water for right now, they are still working tractor beams, and now that we have the principle down, they are pretty much only going to get cooler from here. If you can’t get excited about that, I don’t even know what to say, as I have to assume you are already dead inside.

The new tractor beam design uses a special type of laser known as Bessel beams. Rather than a single beam, Bessel beams are transmitted as concentric circles that converge around the point they’re directed at. This gives the beams a unique quality. If you place a small object between the source of the beam and its destination, the concentric rings of the Bessel beam can reform around the object. That makes it possible for Bessel beams to pull or push objects — a quality of the beams that had been hypothetical until now.

After working with single Bessel beams to try and perfect a tractor beam and failing, New York University physicists David Ruffner and David Grier assembled a device that overlaps two Bessel beams. That overlap, combined with a slight distortion of the beams from a specialized lens, creates a strobing effect in the beams, producing enough energy to pull tiny grains of silica back toward the source of the beams.

The researchers’ work may not be right for tractor beams of the future, which will be used to assemble our space stations and hold extraterrestrial ships in place so we can board and raid them. Scaling up the current design would mean using a ton of energy, and probably destroying whatever objects you were attempting to manipulate with the beam. It opens the door to a really sweet new technology pulled right from the screens of science fiction, though, and most days, that’s good enough for us.

(via PhysOrg)

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  • http://www.facebook.com/paul.pardee Paul Pardee

    There seems to be a recycling of stories lately… I’m not bashing the author of this article since it isn’t restricted to this site. The whole ‘new’ moon creation theory has been around for a while, and I was reading about Bessel beam tractor beams AT LEAST a year ago.

  • http://rayvellest.com/ Ray Vellest

    I haven’t heard of it before, so it does sound pretty cool. But, where’s the action? Once tiny little video with a demonstration, that would be awesome!

  • jomabbs

    I’m not holding my breath on this one… I sence a troll alert coming on.

  • Anonymous

    as cool as it is, this is old China news from last year. I would be more excited if it were evolving further. Though i think the reason for the attraction has nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with evaporation. Thats why this works with a water droplet and not much else. It’s not that its weak, it is just poorly understood, and not what people think it is.

  • http://twitter.com/curc_p David P.Curcione

    1The U.S.S.Enterprise-D made contacted the borg cube is treat to Earth safty in the year of 06/17/2365 A.D too!

  • http://twitter.com/umbrarchist umbrarchist

    We are micro-Borg

    You will be assimilated a little bit at a time.

  • Jack Raze

    EPIC! I know its tiny but AWESOME!!!}:0

  • http://twitter.com/mrbigglesw0rth mrbigglesworth

    sense*

  • http://fixnum.org Wim

    The concept/idea/research may have been around for “at least a year”, but the publication that sparked this post and its source is recent.

    So at the very least, people are still working on this and there are still developments new enough to warrant scientific publication, so I wouldn’t call this stuff “recycled”.

  • Stephen Threlfall

    I remember being shown the technology for this when I was shown around university for my interview. I graduated about 5 years ago so thats how out of date this article is.

  • Scott

    I think we should dub them the “Wee Borg”

  • http://www.facebook.com/daniel.oneal.967 Daniel ONeal

    I already patented “tractor beams”, pay up. Oh, and ty for making the technology for me :)

  • Anonymous

    SHUT UP!

  • Jon Gluvna

    a-a-a-a-a-a-a-aflac
    MAJOR MEDICAL BOYYYYYY!!

  • Bob Jones

    Thank you, armchair physicist.
    I think I’ll stick to reading the opinions of experts, not nobodies.

  • Crazy

    /Agree

  • Crazy

    I WAS excited about this… But now I think I have just died a little inside =’(

  • http://www.facebook.com/charlie.long.58555 Charlie Long

    What’s it like being a virgin?

  • Darshana Welikala

    Great knowledge. This is of course a universal principle which some of our religions had known for many years. Just that we are only seeing them now. Lord Buddha and Jesus Christ demonstrated these principles. Lord Buddha first displayed this 2600 years ago when he brought objects towards him or veered things away when he was in harms way. Christ walked through the mighty blue ocean by parting it into two. “They saw the world as it is. We see the world as we are!” Many more are the principles yet to be discovered by contemporary man.

    I only hope however that these discoveries will serve for the betterment of mankind and not for its destruction!

    Darshana Welikala

  • Anonymous

    I dunno, you tell us what its like to have a chip on your shoulder.

  • Anonymous

    I’m sorry but the title of princess has no meaning to me.

  • Anonymous

    My opinion, is my opinion, and yours is yours. Neither of us are experts, but one of us has an understanding of water and what happens when you flood it with concentrated energy. Great they can shape a laser, even cause it’s frequency to fluctuate. Great. But it’s hardly a tractor beam. Least not by Star Trek definition. Maybe if you had even a rudimentary idea how these two very different devices worked…

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=566681373 Johnny Cirrito

    Try rereading the article and you will see they are not suing it on water dropplets!

  • Anonymous

    Yes how about we read it together:
    “Even though they are super tiny and effective only on microscopic items like silica spheres suspended in water for right now…”

  • http://www.facebook.com/hans.vonmehler Hans Von Mehler

    Now to get to work on that Warp Drive thingy..

  • jimboscifi

    A tractor beam really is just either positive ions or negative ions being bombarded at an object that has anything metal or anything with a positive/negative field(like something with iron or a naturally occuring electromagnetic field), and depending on the polarity of the field being generated, it will either attract the object to it depending on the field strength, or it will push it away….just like how a powerful magnet will push away or pull towards it another magnet…….thanks.

  • marc

    DON’T FEED THE TROLL, idiots.

  • Ted

    Funny how much negativity people are sending your way for trying to explain things to them.

  • Wadaya, High?

    But they’re working with silica gel, which isn’t metallic or magnetic…….thanks.

  • befuddled

    Could we program it to clean house go out and mow lawns? Hay, Wheat etc.?

  • http://www.facebook.com/catherineherrmann Catherine Herrmann

    It’s just the beginning of a promising future. They will be famous one day. Never say never! Resistance is futile.

  • DLHasse

    Using the frequencies of light limits the mass but easily obtainable amplification. Focusing modulated beams of other vibrational frequencies should be able to set up resonances in larger chunks of materials and through de-tuning push or draw them, or with the appropriate amplification cause phase change. Not sure what such a violent species would do with this knowledge, camped on it for years to avoid being the person responsible for death rays. Piezoelectric resonant surfaces as positioners should work in the material handling realm but need a transmission medium.

  • Neb

    Yeah, I was unaware that ‘I have some experience in this field and it seems to me like…’ could be considered a ‘troll’. People use that term far too loosely. I’m rooting for you to be wrong rflulling, simply because this sounds cool :). Thanks for the further info though.

  • Hovno112

    píča Kurva už

  • http://www.facebook.com/anthony.pierce.965 Anthony Pierce

    TRACTOR BEAMS GIVE US THE CAPABILITY TO BUILD ANYTHING ATOM BY ATOM LIKE A HEART OR LUNG, (IMMORTALITY), YOU CAN BUILD A STEREO ATOM BY ATOM OR TAKE ANYTHING APART ATOM BY ATOM, ON MOTHER SPACESHIPS YOU CAN MOVE SHUTTLES,, BUILT AROUND THE SUN AND POWERED BY THE SUN YOU CAN MOVE SPACESHIPS INTER-GALACTICALLY FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT, (TIME TRAVEL), NOW WE CAN CREATE OUR OWN PLANETS AND UNIVERSES AND IT MAKES A ANTI GRAVITATIONAL MACHINE. ALSO GOT FOR NON INVASIVE SURGERY AND MINING