On the eighth floor of 4 Washington Place, tiny pieces of glass 1.5 micrometers long are being moved with a beam of light. This is the result of NYU professor David Grier and GSAS Department of Physics graduate student David Ruffner’s research on Bessel beams, one of the several tractor beams that NASA is studying for future use in space.
In an approach only theoretical before their research, Grier and Ruffner overlapped two Bessel beams — beams that have life light and forms a bull’s eye rather than a single point — to form a pattern of bright and dark spots along the beams’ axes. Currently, they have successfully used the beams to move the plastic and glass beads on a microscope slide or a lab on a chip. Despite recent difficulties in funding, Grier is optimistic about a partnership with NASA.
“What [NASA] would like us to do is get to the millimeter range, so that funding opportunities on their end become less speculative and more concrete,” Grier said. “There is reason to believe this can be done with tabletop equipment, nothing too fancy. And then if that’s working, the team at NASA will take that and try and extend it to the kilometer scale, which is their ultimate dream.”
While the technology is exciting, they are not be expecting to be beamed off a spaceship any time soon.
“I was doing the calculations the other day, and it would take 30 trillion laser pointers to move a person,” Ruffner said. “This isn’t happening next week.”
Applications of the technology are more likely to be in medicine. For example the lab on a chip has already been developed by NASA to conduct fast and reliable blood tests for astronauts on long missions. The chip does away with much of the clunky equipment, and fewer operating technicians are needed to perform tests like counting red and white blood cells and analyzing blood plasma. The lab on a chip also does not require much blood.
In the future, chips like these could be used in neonatal units where babies are too small and weak to survive a blood transfusion. The beams could also be used to collect particles for environmental monitoring, especially in inhospitable temperatures or altitudes.
This is not to say that tractor beams cannot be applied to space research in the near future. Paul Sysley, a laser expert at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said the current research has direct applications to NASA missions.
“Right now, we are pursuing a two-pronged approach to our tractor beam research,” Sysley said. “[Research] that would work in an atmosphere that could be used on rover missions for example … and one where we would pursue a technology that would work in vacuum.”
Although it may take some time to move from blood tests to rover mission transport, CAS freshman Anne Falcon was excited by the latest research.
“I really cannot wait for the day when we will be able to say ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ and mean it,” Falcon said.
A version of this article appeared in the Tuesday, Nov. 6 print edition. Margaret Eby is a staff writer. Email her at [email protected].
