Laser-powered, ‘metajets’ could be the future of interstellar flight
Alpha Centauri sits more than four light-years away, close enough to fascinate generations of dreamers and far enough to make today’s rockets look painfully limited. At current speeds, a trip there would take far longer than a human lifetime, or even many civilizations. A new set of experiments points to a very different idea, one in which light itself does the pushing. Engineers at Texas A&M University have built tiny devices that can be lifted, pushed and steered by laser light without any physical contact. The objects, called metajets, move because their surfaces are carefully structured to redirect light in ways that generate force. In the lab, that force was strong enough to produce not just motion across a surface but controlled movement in three dimensions. The work comes from Dr. Shoufeng Lan, an assistant professor in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, and researchers in his Lab for Advanced Nanophotonics. Their study describes a way to build control into the material itself, rather than relying only on shaping the incoming beam. …
