Tractor beams, energy rays that can move objects, are a science fiction mainstay. But now they are becoming a reality -- at least for moving very tiny objects.
General Physics
Sep 8, 2010
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(PhysOrg.com) -- In a major physics breakthrough, University of Otago scientists have developed a technique to consistently isolate and capture a fast-moving neutral atom - and have also seen and photographed this atom for ...
General Physics
Oct 1, 2010
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A team of physicists from the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms and other universities has developed a special type of quantum computer known as a programmable quantum simulator capable of operating with 256 quantum ...
Optics & Photonics
Jul 8, 2021
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5584
Researchers have developed a way to use laser light to pull a macroscopic object. Although microscopic optical tractor beams have been demonstrated before, this is one of the first times that laser pulling has been used on ...
Optics & Photonics
Jan 11, 2023
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Researchers at Caltech have designed a way to levitate and propel objects using only light, by creating specific nanoscale patterning on the objects' surfaces.
Optics & Photonics
Mar 19, 2019
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A century after Albert Einstein said we would never be able to observe the instantaneous velocity of tiny particles as they randomly shake and shimmy, so called Brownian motion, physicist Mark Raizen and his group have done ...
General Physics
May 20, 2010
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Physicists have proposed an entirely new way to test the quantum superposition principle—the idea that a quantum object can exist in multiple states at the same time. The new test is based on examining the quantum rotation ...
Optical tweezers use light to immobilize microscopic particles as small as a single atom in 3D space. The basic principle behind optical tweezers is the momentum transfer between light and the object being held. Analogous ...
Optics & Photonics
Jan 26, 2022
0
604
(PhysOrg.com) -- Since 1970, scientists have been working with “optical tweezers” - lasers that move microscopic amounts of matter using forces originating from the light matter interaction. Now, for the first time, researchers ...
When a particle is completely isolated from its environment, the laws of quantum physics start to play a crucial role. One important requirement to see quantum effects is to remove all thermal energy from the particle motion, ...
Quantum Physics
Mar 29, 2019
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