Related papers: Minimizing the Ground Effect for Photophoretically…
Space exploration is of paramount importance to advancing fundamental science and providing global services, such as navigation and communications. However, today's space missions are hindered by limitations of existing propulsion…
The most likely cause of levitation of dust above the surface of atmosphereless planets is the electrostatic mechanism. However, the crucial problem in the explanation of this effect is a determination of the reason why a large electric…
The levitation of condensed matter in vacuum allows the study of its physical properties under extreme isolation from the environment. It also offers a venue to investigate quantum mechanics with large systems, at the transition between the…
Gridded ion thrusters are tested in ground vacuum chambers to verify their performance when deployed in space. However, the presence of high background pressure and conductive walls in the chamber leads to facility effects that increase…
Flapping wings enable flying animals and biomimetic robots to generate elevated aerodynamic forces. Measurements that demonstrate this capability are based on tethered experiments with robots and animals, and indirect force calculations…
Light forces can be harnessed to levitate mesoscopic objects and cool them down towards their motional quantum ground state. Significant roadblocks on the way to scale up levitation from a single to multiple particles in close proximity are…
The current preferred envisioned method for transmitting power to a space elevator climber is a laser/photovoltaic (PV) system. In this, a ground-based laser beam would transmit megawatts of optical power through the atmosphere to an…
This study describes the development and validation of a novel microgravity experimental platform that is mainly applied to small robots such as modular self-reconfigurable robots. This platform mainly consists of an air supply system, a…
Vacuum fluctuations give rise to effective nonlinear interactions between electromagnetic fields. These generically modify the characteristics of light traversing a strong-field region. X-ray free-electron lasers constitute a particularly…
Lightsails are a promising spacecraft concept that can reach relativistic speeds via propulsion by laser light, allowing travel to nearby stars within a human lifetime. The success of a lightsail mission requires that any motion in the…
With the recent important development of microfluidic systems, miniaturization of flow devices has become a real challenge. Microchannels, however, are characterized by a large surface to volume ratio, so that surface properties strongly…
The particle-in-cell simulation is applied to study a nanometer-sized dielectric particle lofting from a dielectric substrate exposed to a low energy electron beam. The article discusses the electron accumulation between such a substrate…
The author researched this new idea - support of flight by any aerial vehicles at significant altitude solely by the magnetic field of the planet. It is shown that current technology allows humans to create a light propulsion (AB engine)…
A distant mirror leads to a vacuum-induced level shift in a laser-excited atom. This effect has been measured with a single mirror 25 cm away from a single, trapped barium ion. This dispersive action is the counterpart to the mirror's…
Protoplanetary disks start their lives with a dust free inner region where the temperatures are higher than the sublimation temperature of solids. As the star illuminates the innermost particles, which are immersed in gas at the sublimation…
The controlled handling of liquids and colloidal suspensions as they interact with surfaces, targeting a broad palette of related functionalities, is of great importance in science, technology, and nature. When small liquid volumes need to…
Many experiments in the field of optical levitation with nanoparticles today are limited by the available technologies for particle loading. Here we introduce a new particle loading method that solves the main challenges, namely…
For accurately obtaining the relationship between the carrier mobility and the applied electric field, a new multi-layer sample has been designed. Polyvinyl fluoride (PVF) films were hot pressed on both sides of linear low density…
Light-in-flight (LiF) measurements enable the visualization of light paths through arbitrary, volumetric scenes, making light-matter interactions at ultrafast timescales visible. Traditionally, LiF measurements require specialized…
The transfer of angular momentum carried by photons into a microobject has been widely exploited to achieve the actuation of the microobject. However, this scheme is fundamentally defective in nonliquid environments as a result of the scale…