• Microscope “tractor beams,” known to scientists as optical tweezers, are found either in bulky, expensive setups or in smaller, chip-sized devices.
• However, this second type of devices has a big drawback; they typically cannot manage cells away from the surfaces of their chips, which can damage the samples being examined.
• MIT researchers believed they had solved this problem by creating a new phase model for microscale antennas on the chip; This made it possible for particles to receive a “tractor beam” of more than a millimeter from the surface of the chip (about 100 times more than was previously possible). ).

“Turcer beam activation” is a well-known science fiction phrase, but the idea of ​​this type of energy manipulation is more real than you might think. In recent years, scientists have developed a tractor beam-like technology. Hope to clean up some space junk or moving other types of macro-sized objects around.

While images of the USS Enterprise or the Death Star bringing down a rogue spaceship may come to mind, tractor beams in the here and now can be applied to the microscopic world, where they are more commonly known as: optical tweezers. At its most basic, this technique uses light to manipulate incredibly small objects, down to the size of a single atom. Despite this extremely small use case, most of these devices are bulky and specialized setups. But now scientists at MIT have successfully created a tractor beam device that fits in the palm of your hand. And It can manipulate objects to a much greater extent than previous chip-based ancestors. Researchers detailed their work last month in the magazine Nature Communication.

Unlike their larger counterparts, chip-based tweezers are compact, mass-produced, and more widely accessible. But these have a rather big drawback: the distance of the “tractor beams” does not extend very far beyond the surfaces. chips themselves. This can sometimes damage the chips and the cells being examined. But the MIT team thinks they have overcome this limitation by using an integrated optical phase array that can guide cells over distances 100 times greater than previously possible.

“This work opens up new possibilities for chip-based optical tweezers by allowing cells to be captured and tweezed at much greater distances than previously demonstrated,” said study senior author Jelena Notaros of MIT. he said in a press release. He also described the breakthrough as “several orders of magnitude improvement” compared to previous attempts. “It’s exciting to think about the different applications this could enable. technology.”

Optical traps and tweezers work by capturing and manipulating tiny particles in focused beams of light. Researchers can then direct the beams in any direction they want. However, biological samples are generally sterile (via a glass coverslip approximately 150 microns thick), so increasing the control distance to over one millimeter is really valuable. And due to the cheap cost of the system (compared to expensive microscope setups), it can deliver even more. laboratories Access this useful research tool.

“With silicon photonics we can obtain such large data, typically at laboratory scale. system and we integrate it into a chip.” Notaros said in a press release. “This offers a great solution for biologists because it provides them with optical trapping and tweezing functionality without the overhead of a complex bulk optical setup.”

To create the chip, the researchers used a microscale integrated optical phase array. antennas It has the ability to individually direct the light beam emitted by the chip. MIT’s breakthrough developed a new phase pattern for each antenna; thus, the antenna could perform optical trapping and tweezing away from the surface of the chip.

So while this is happening microscope They’re exploring an exciting world where tractor beams may not be able to thwart the evil plans of a galactic ne’er-do-well any time soon. border discoveries entirely their own.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about science fiction and how our world works. If you look hard enough you can find his previous works on Gizmodo and Paste.