An optical reaction micro-turbine

Silvio Bianchi, Gaszton Vizsnyiczai, Stefano Ferretti, Claudio Maggi and Roberto Leonardo ()
Additional contact information
Silvio Bianchi: NANOTEC-CNR, Institute of Nanotechnology, Soft and Living Matter Laboratory
Gaszton Vizsnyiczai: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma “Sapienza”
Stefano Ferretti: Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma “Sapienza”
Claudio Maggi: NANOTEC-CNR, Institute of Nanotechnology, Soft and Living Matter Laboratory
Roberto Leonardo: NANOTEC-CNR, Institute of Nanotechnology, Soft and Living Matter Laboratory

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract To any energy flow there is an associated flow of momentum, so that recoil forces arise every time an object absorbs or deflects incoming energy. This same principle governs the operation of macroscopic turbines as well as that of microscopic turbines that use light as the working fluid. However, a controlled and precise redistribution of optical energy is not easy to achieve at the micron scale resulting in a low efficiency of power to torque conversion. Here we use direct laser writing to fabricate 3D light guiding structures, shaped as a garden sprinkler, that can precisely reroute input optical power into multiple output channels. The shape parameters are derived from a detailed theoretical analysis of losses in curved microfibers. These optical reaction micro-turbines can maximally exploit light’s momentum to generate a strong, uniform and controllable torque.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06947-y Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-06947-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06947-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().