Related papers: High Forward Thrust Metasurface Beam-Riding Sail
Highly ambitious initiatives aspire to propel a miniature spacecraft to a neighboring star within a human generation, leveraging the radiation pressure of lasers for propulsion. One of the main challenges to achieving this enormous feat is…
Metasurface antenna arrays, formed by tiling multiple metasurface subapertures, offer an alternative architecture to electrically large beamsteering arrays often used in radar and communications. The advantages offered by metasurfaces are…
A scheme for fast, compact, and controllable acceleration of heavy particles in vacuum is proposed, in which two counterpropagating lasers with variable frequencies drive a beat-wave structure with variable phase velocity, thus allowing for…
A metamaterial structure consisting of a one-dimensional metal/air-gap subwavelength grating is investigated for optical antireflection coating on germanium substrate in the infrared regime. For incident light polarized perpendicularly to…
We demonstrate first- and second-order spatial differentiation of an optical beam transverse profile using thin suspended subwavelength gratings. Highly reflective one-dimensional gratings are patterned on suspended 200 nm-thick silicon…
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 Magnetic Sail is a space propulsion system that utilizes the interaction between solar wind particles and an artificial dipole magnetic field generated by a spacecraft's coil to produce thrust without the need for additional plasma or…
Wave-based signal processing has witnessed a significant expansion of interest in a variety of science and engineering disciplines, as it provides new opportunities for achieving high-speed and low-power operations. Although flat optics…
Static strain in complex oxide heterostructures has been extensively used to engineer electronic and magnetic properties at equilibrium. In the same spirit, deformations of the crystal lattice with light may be used to achieve functional…
This study explores the world of across-layer sliding ferroelectricity in multilayer hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and gallium nitride (hGaN), aiming to control out-of-plane polarization. By investigating the effects of sliding single or…
The dynamics of the acceleration of ultrathin foil targets by the radiation pressure of superintense, circularly polarized laser pulses is investigated by analytical modeling and particle-in-cell simulations. By addressing self-induced…
The components of blazar jets that emit radiation span a factor of $10^{10}$ in scale. The spatial structure of these emitting regions depends on the observed energy. Photons emitted at different sites cross the lens plane at different…
This paper presents a mechanically bistable mechanism of the compressed pre-curved beam. A governing equation is proposed which can be used to predict and explain the bistability of the compressed pre-curved beam. FE simulations and…
The fission thrust sail as booster for nuclear fusion-based rocket propulsion for future starships is studied. Some required aspects of these systems such as neutron moderation and sail regeneration are discussed. First order calculations…
Lightsails using Earth-based lasers for propulsion require passive stabilization to stay within the beam. This can be achieved through the sail's scattering properties, creating optical restoring forces and torques. Undamped restoring…
By using multi-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation, we present a new regime of stable proton beam acceleration which takes place when a two-specie shaped foil is illuminated by a circularly polarized laser pulse. It is observed that the…
The Solar sail is a large thin film used to collect solar light pressure for moving of space apparatus. Unfortunately, the solar radiation pressure is very small about 9 mkN/sq.m at Earth's orbit. However, the light force significantly…
We develop a single-layer waveguide surface grating structure to vertically couple near infrared (NIR) light at ~1.55 um wavelength from a large area (~100 um length scale) Si waveguide on a Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) substrates to…
Planar metamaterials with tailorable electromagnetic properties in the terahertz domain offer customized optics solutions that are needed for the development of imaging and spectroscopy systems. In particular, metamaterials carry the…
We experimentally demonstrate a novel interferometric architecture for next-generation gravity missions, featuring a laser ranging interferometer (LRI) that enables monoaxial transmission and reception of laser beams between two optical…