Nanoscale Light Mill
In 2010 researchers at the University of California, Berkeley succeeded in building a nanoscale light mill that works on an entirely different principle to the Crookes radiometer. A swastika shaped gold light mill, only 100 nanometers in diameter, was built and illuminated by laser light that had been tuned to have an angular momentum. The possibility of doing this had been suggested by the Princeton physicist Richard Beth in 1936. The torque was greatly enhanced by the resonant coupling of the incident light to plasmonic waves in the gold structure.
Read more about this topic: Crookes Radiometer
Famous quotes containing the words light and/or mill:
“The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)