That’s right. Once again scientists have made another component of the Death Star possible: We’ve now proven the tractor beam can be built.
Two physicists from New York University have developed a technique for using beams of light to draw a particle toward the source of light.
Professor David Grier and grad student David Ruffner are working at the Department of Physics and Centre for Soft Matter Research and claim they have created the future tech and proven it works in an experimental setting on a miniscule scale.
Up until now, the best scientists could imagine were laser-based “tweezers” that could drag objects across two dimensions.
We’ve known for a while that light can push objects, but Grier and Ruffner have published a paper with their findings, discovering that light can also pull objects.
They were able to accomplish this by projecting two Bessel beams side by side down a microscope and using a lens to angle them so they overlap a particular object. From the tech doing the science making the thing okay whatever — if you want to get into the technical side of things, you can go look it up.
Let’s just say we got a tractor beam, we’re able to move microscopic particles a microscopic distance, and NASA is super interested in what’s going down in New York.
