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:
“And I that have not your faith, how shall I know
That in the blinding light beyond the grave
We’ll find so good a thing as that we have lost?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)