In a breakthrough that sounds like it’s straight out of a science fiction novel, researchers have successfully created a tractor beam using twisting light beams. This isn’t your standard Star Trek-style tractor beam, but it’s a significant step towards manipulating objects with light in ways once thought impossible.
The key to this achievement is a specially designed silicon metasurface — a flat, engineered surface that can control light in extraordinary ways. It generates a twisting pattern of light that rotates around a central axis as it travels.
What makes this beam special is its ability to exert force on objects in the opposite direction of the light’s travel. Normally, when you shine a laser beam at something — like a solar sail — it pushes that something away. A tractor beam is more like a focused magnet that pulls the other object closer.
It works like of like the way a drill bit pulls up sawdust, or a corkscrew pulls up a cork. But lightbeams are pretty small, so the things that this tractor beam can catch are pretty small — particle-sized, in fact.
But it could prove useful in space exploration, or, closer to home, for medicine, by making biopsies less invasive.
Previous attempts to create such beams relied on bulky, expensive equipment, this new metasurface approach is remarkably compact and efficient, bringing portable tractor beams closer to reality.
There are also other ways to create a tractor beam. For example, NASA is working on an electrostatic tractor beam, where they would shoot electrons at some space junk, making it negatively charged, so that it could be electrostatically attracted and pulled away someplace safer.
You could get your tractor beam hunger sated by checking out any of the Star Trek series or the Star Wars movies. Apple TV’s Foundation series also has tractor beams used to lifting people up into a ship. Or check out this book series:
Lensman by E.E. “Doc” Smith
E.E. “Doc” Smith was one of the first sci-fi authors to feature tractor beams. Check out the five-book Lensman series, which starts with Triplanetary, and which contains some of the largest space battles ever written.
It also has two dueling alien civilizations and humans with some alien genetics who play a key role in the battle.
Smith coined the term tractor beam, which is short for “attractor beam.”
The series was a runner-up for the 1966 Hugo award, losing out to the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.
It’s written in an old-fashioned style, due to being an old book, the female characters leave a lot to be desired, and the main focus is on the plot, so there’s not a lot of interiority or depth to anyone. But then again, who needs interiority when you’ve got space pirates — they’re the ones with the tractor beams — and a beautiful woman swooning into the hero’s arms right in the first chapter?
For something a little bit more recent, and from our own MetaStellar community, you can read the first chapter of The Dawn Cluster I: Detriment by Mark J. Schultis for free here. There’s also a spaceship battle in the first chapter in which tractor beams are involved!
MetaStellar editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist, writing stories set in a future virtual world. And, during the day, she is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@metastellar.com. She is also the editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business, one of the top global sites covering virtual reality.