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:
“O thou immortal light and heat!
Whose hand so shines through all this frame,
That by the beauty of the seat,
We plainly see who made the same.
Seeing thy seed abides in me,
Dwell thou in it, and I in thee.”
—Henry Vaughan (1622–1695)
“The miller believes that all the wheat grows so that his mill keeps running.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)