相关论文: Pentagonal Photonic Crystal Mirrors: Scalable Ligh…

The Starshot lightsail project aims to build an ultralight spacecraft ("nanocraft") that can reach Proxima Centauri b in approximately 20 years, requiring propulsion with a relativistic velocity of ~60 000 km/s. The spacecraft's…

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…

The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative aims to send a gram-scale probe to Proxima Centuri B using a laser-accelerated lightsail traveling at relativistic speeds. Thermal management is a key lightsail design objective because of the intense…

Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative to prove ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts, and lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Along the way, the project could generate important supplementary…

Light can exert forces on objects, promising to propel a meter-scale lightsail to near the speed of light. The key to address many challenges in such an ambition hinges on the nanostructuring of lightsails to tailor their optical scattering…

Laser-accelerated lightsails enable new types of missions that are very different from the Breakthrough Starshot mission to the Centauri system that aims to send 1 gram of payload at 0.2 c. The present work widens the mission design space…

Demand for lightweight, highly reflective and mechanically compliant mirrors for optics experiments has seen a significant surge. In this aspect, photonic crystal (PhC) membranes are ideal alternatives to conventional mirrors, as they…

The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative is suggested to develop the concept of propelling a nano-scale spacecraft by the radiation pressure of an intense laser beam. If such a nanocraft could be accelerated to 20 percent of light speed, it…

Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative to propel a sailcraft to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. As the sailcraft transits Alpha Centauri at 0.2 c, it looks for signs of life by imaging planets and gathering other scientific data.…

Lightsails are a highly promising spacecraft concept that has attracted interest in recent years due to its potential to travel at near-relativistic speeds. Such speeds, which current conventional crafts cannot reach, offer tantalizing…

The authors describe the general motion of radiation-pushed sails accelerated near the speed of light with directed energy propulsion. Practical applications of the model are also given, including the interstellar flyby mission to the Alpha…

Neuromorphic photonics promises sub-nanosecond latency, ultrawide bandwidth, and high parallelism, but practical scalability is constrained by fabrication tolerances, spectral alignment, and tuning energy. Here, we present a large-scale,…

Photonic computing chips have made significant progress in accelerating linear computations, but nonlinear computations are usually implemented in the digital domain, which introduces additional system latency and power consumption, and…

The most pressing problems in modern astrophysics have often required the largest telescopes. With the cost scaling of mirror diameters, the field as a whole is faced with a challenge -- how to replicate or improve on the collecting area…

Achieving laser-driven, reflective, relativistic light sails would represent a tremendous breakthrough for humankind, allowing us to advance our understanding of the solar system and deep space far beyond what we know from space probes,…

Lightsail spacecraft, propelled to relativistic velocities via photon pressure using high power density laser radiation, offer a potentially new route to space exploration within and beyond the solar system, extending to interstellar…

Deciding on appropriate materials and designs for use in light sails, like the one proposed in the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, is a topic that requires much care and forethought. Here, we offer a feasible option in the form of…

Microwave propelled sails are a new class of spacecraft using photon acceleration. It is the only method of interstellar flight that has no physics issues. Laboratory demonstrations of basic features of beam-driven propulsion, flight,…

We designed an on-chip transformative optic system of a metalens-photonic crystal resonator metasystem on a foundry compatible silicon photonic platform. By adjusting the on-chip metalens' focusing length and mode dimension, the insertion…

Photonic crystals allow unprecedented control over how light is confined, propagates, and interacts with matter. Their development has had a transformative impact on optics and physics, and they remain the central platform for both…