FRANCE: Scots scientists have found a way to slow down the speed of light in a move that could boost science and medical diagnosis.
Professor Kishan Dholakia and Dr Yoshihiko Arita of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews teamed up with Dr Mark Scullion and Professor Thomas Krauss of the University of York to create a specially fabricated nanostructure and used it to drive particles at high speed along a track of light.
Dholakia said: “The team has performed a very exciting study that shows a new way to speed up the microscopic world, making it easier to transport fragile biological material that in turn could have major applications in fundamental science and even medical diagnosis.”
The research could open up more rapid methods of understanding disease or the way in which we look at the biological world in general.
As light bends through a transparent object such as a marble, it exerts a minuscule but important force. The marble would not move as the force is too weak, but the force is sufficient to move and propel particles the size of blood cells or smaller.
Dholakia explained: “We are very excited about this. It turns out that light can exert a small force, in other words it can exert motion on an object.
“So if I shine light on a mirror, for example, it bounces back. A physicist might say ‘why doesn’t the mirror move?’. But that light force is very small. In science fiction we have the idea of a tractor beam where light can somehow grab and move objects without damaging them.
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