Self-stabilization of light sails by damped internal degrees of freedom
Classical Physics
2024-01-31 v1 Optics
Abstract
We consider the motion of a light sail that is accelerated by a powerful laser beam. We derive the equations of motion for two proof-of-concept sail designs with damped internal degrees of freedom. Using linear stability analysis we show that perturbations of the sail movement in all lateral degrees of freedom can be damped passively. This analysis also shows complicated behaviour akin to that associated with exceptional points in PT-symmetric systems in optics and quantum mechanics. The excess heat that is produced by the damping mechanism is likely to be substantially smaller than the expected heating due to the partial absorption of the incident laser beam by the sail.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2106.10961,
title = {Self-stabilization of light sails by damped internal degrees of freedom},
author = {M. Z. Rafat and Holger R. Dullin and Boris T. Kuhlmey and Alessandro Tuniz and Haoyuan Luo and Dibyendu Roy and Sean Skinner and Tristram J. Alexander and Michael S. Wheatland and C. Martijn de Sterke},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.10961},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
7 figures