The Light can Generate Lift?

The light that can work to produce power that can make aircraft flying. With proper design, uniform flow of light encouraging the objects are very small like the wings of an airplane to raise the fuselage to the air.

Physicists in the United States have demonstrated the optical analogue of an aerofoil--a "lightfoil" that generates lift when passing through laser light.

Optical Lift on a Nano Scale.  
(Picture from: http://www.popsci.com/)

The demonstration, which comes more than a century after the development of the first airplanes, suggests that lightfoils could one day be used to maneuver objects in the vacuum of outer space using only the Sun's rays. "It's almost like the first stages of what the Wright brothers did," says lead author Grover Swartzlander, a physicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, whose study appeared December 5, 2010 in Nature Photonics. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

The new trick is more attractive light than an ordinary push: It creates a more complicated force called lift, the evidence as a flow in one direction to move an object vertically. Air foil or airfoil generates lift force, when the engine turning the propeller and the aircraft moves forward, its wings are tilted causing the plane ride.

Light foil is not intended to maintain a fixed plane in the air during a flight from one airport to another airport. But the unity of the tools are very small it may be used to power the micro machines, transporting the particles are very small or even allow the methods of the steering system on the solar sail.

The shape and internal properties of a tiny plastic 'lightfoil' bend laser light. The angles of the incoming and outgoing light (red) determine the direction in which the object moves (blue). (Picture from: http://www.newscientist.com/)

The light may have an unexpected lift starts from a very simple question, Swartzlander said, “If we have something shaped wing and we shine with the light, what happens?” Modeling experiments showed the researchers that an asymmetrical deflection of light will create a lift force is very stable. “So we thought it best to do an experiment,” said Swartzlander.

The researchers created a very small rods shaped like an airplane wing, on the one side and flat on the other side of the winding. When the foil-micron-sized air foil is immersed into the water and hit with 130 milliwatts of light from the bottom of the container, foil-foil began to move upward, as expected. But the bars are also beginning to move sideways, perpendicular to the direction of incoming light. Symmetrical balls are very small lift force does not show this effect, as the team found.

Optical lift force is different from the aerodynamic lift force with an air foil. An airplane flies because air flowing more slowly under its wings using a pressure greater than the air that flows faster above. But in light foil, lift force created within the objects when the beam of light through it. thus transparent air foil shape causes the light is refracted differently depending on where the light was passed, which causes the bending beam within their momentum that generates lift. *** [SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN | SCIENCERAY | NEWSCIENTIST | SEPTI | PIKIRAN RAKYAT 27092012]

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