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Archive for the ‘tractor beam’ category: Page 3

Jan 22, 2018

The world’s most powerful acoustic tractor beam could pave the way for levitating humans

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, tractor beam, transportation

Acoustic tractor beams use the power of sound to hold particles in mid-air, and unlike magnetic levitation, they can grab most solids or liquids. For the first time University of Bristol engineers have shown it is possible to stably trap objects larger than the wavelength of sound in an acoustic tractor beam. This discovery opens the door to the manipulation of drug capsules or micro-surgical implements within the body. Container-less transportation of delicate larger samples is now also a possibility and could lead to levitating humans.

Researchers previously thought that acoustic tractor beams were fundamentally limited to levitating small objects as all the previous attempts to trap particles larger than the wavelength had been unstable, with objects spinning uncontrollably. This is because rotating field transfers some of its spinning motion to the objects causing them to orbit faster and faster until they are ejected.

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Oct 4, 2016

Optical forces used to make rewritable 3D holographic materials

Posted by in categories: biological, computing, nanotechnology, tractor beam

(Phys.org)—Researchers have used the pressure of light—also called optical forces or sometimes “tractor beams”—to create a new type of rewritable, dynamic 3D holographic material. Unlike other 3D holographic materials, the new material can be rapidly written and erased many times, and can also store information without using any external energy. The new material has potential applications in 3D holographic displays, large-scale volumetric data storage devices, biosensors, tunable lasers, optical lenses, and metamaterials.

The research was conducted by a multidisciplinary team led by Yunuen Montelongo at Imperial College London and Ali K. Yetisen at Harvard University and MIT. In recent papers published in Nature Communications and Applied Physics Letters, the researchers demonstrated the reversible optical manipulation of nanostructured materials, which they used to fabricate active 3D holograms, lenses, and memory devices.

The key to creating the 3D holographic material with these advantages was to use optical forces to reversibly modify the material’s properties. The optical forces are produced by the interference of two or more laser beams, which creates an optical pressure capable of moving nanoscale structures. So far, optical forces have mainly been used for just one application: optical tweezers, which can hold and move tiny objects and are mostly used in biological applications.

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Jul 25, 2016

‘Tractor beams’ build atom-by-atom assembly in mid-air

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics, tractor beam

Physicists have manipulated 50 individual atoms at once in a dramatic upscaling of a technique vital to quantum computing. Cathal O’Connell explains.

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Apr 15, 2016

Nanotubes assemble! Rice introduces Teslaphoresis

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, tractor beam

Carbon nanotubes in a dish assemble themselves into a nanowire in seconds under the influence of a custom-built Tesla coil created by scientists at Rice University.

But the scientists don’t limit their aspirations for the phenomenon they call Teslaphoresis to simple nanowires.

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Oct 29, 2015

Holographic sonic tractor beam lifts and moves objects using soundwaves

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, tractor beam

More *!* — WOW — *!*
How can anyone NOT love science?!


Holograms (3-D light fields) can be projected from a 2-dimensional surface to control objects. (credit: Asier Marzo, Bruce Drinkwater and Sriram Subramanian)

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Oct 27, 2015

World’s first sonic tractor beam lifts objects using sound waves

Posted by in category: tractor beam

Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Sussex, in collaboration with Ultrahaptics, have built the world’s first sonic tractor beam that can lift and move objects using sound waves.

Details of the device, published in Nature Communications, describe how the tractor beam uses high-amplitude sound waves to generate an acoustic hologram that is capable of picking up and moving small objects. The technique comes straight from the pages of a science-fiction novel.

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Jun 18, 2015

“In Motion” Levitation Is Possible And No Longer Just a Myth — Eamon Kunze WT Vox

Posted by in categories: anti-gravity, tractor beam

Startship controlled by a tractor beam

Levitation and the defiance of gravity is possible. If until now levitation was just a magic act or circus “reality” or, tractor beam technology existed just in sci-fi movies, recently, a team of Japanese researchers have demonstrated the first technology that not only brings the mythology of levitation to life but leap frogs it to create a tractor beam, lifting and moving objects across 3 dimensions using sound alone.

The essence of levitation technology is the countervailing of gravity. By stoping gravity, levitation is possible. It is known that an ultrasound standing wave is capable of suspending small particles at its sound pressure nodes. The acoustic axis of the ultrasound beam in conventional studies was parallel to the gravitational force, and the levitated objects were manipulated along the fixed axis (i.e. one-dimensionally) by controlling the phases or frequencies of bolted Langevin-type transducers.

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