Tractor Beam Improvement

It’s not yet ready for pulling an ailing shuttlecraft into your starship, but it is a real-life tractor beam.

tractor beam—a special beam of electromagnetic radiation that draws particles toward it instead of pushing them away—might be a concept straight from Star Trek, but scientists from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) have recently taken steps toward a more portable way to generate one in real life.

To be clear, this paper details the new metasurface—the “plate” that turns regular light into a spiraling tractor beam. It’s not about the beam’s ability to then draw in particles, which is well established at this point.

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4 thoughts on “Tractor Beam Improvement

  1. Ha. Getting a chuckle here. In Star Trek, the process is reversed – it’s supposedly a near-impossible task to turn the tractor beam into a repulsor beam. But in TNG, Wesley figures it out. I can’t recall any subsequent episode, in the entire Trek timeline, where this gets used again.

  2. Fun trivia – James Doohan was the person who came up with the concept of a tractor beam. He was an amazing man with an amazing life.

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