Light-based 'tractor beam' assembles materials at the nanoscale

Modern construction is a precision endeavor. Builders must use components manufactured to meet specific standards—such as beams of a desired composition or rivets of a specific size. The building industry relies on manufacturers ...

How to 3-D print your own sonic tractor beam

Last year Asier Marzo, then a doctoral student at the Public University of Navarre, helped develop the first single-sided acoustic tractor beam—that is, the first realization of trapping and pulling an object using sound ...

Optical tractor beam traps bacteria

Until recently, if scientists wanted to study blood cells, algae, or bacteria under the microscope, they had to mount these cells on a substrate such as a glass slide. Physicists at Bielefeld and Frankfurt Universities have ...

Scientists demonstrate Stokes drift principle

In nature, waves – such as those in the ocean – begin as local oscillations in the water that spread out, ripple fashion, from their point of origin. But fans of Star Trek will recall a different sort of wave pattern: ...

Physicists create tractor beam for microscopic particles

(Phys.org)—New York University physicists have created a tractor beam capable of pulling particles micrometers in size. This so-called optical conveyor tractor beam, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, has ...

NASA studying ways to make 'tractor beams' a reality

Tractor beams -- the ability to trap and move objects using laser light -- are the stuff of science fiction, but a team of NASA scientists has won funding to study the concept for remotely capturing planetary or atmospheric ...

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