Research Findings on Tractive Beams

The system developed by André Rode and colleagues uses a hollow laser beam to hit a target and then uses air temperature differences to move the object. The moved glass target is hundreds of times larger than the bacteria that "light tweezers" often move, and they've moved it at least 1.5 meters, which is (in 2010) 100 times the distance that "light tweezers" can manipulate. And while the 1.5-meter figure is only due to the size of the lab bench, Rhodes believes that moving the target object more than 30 feet (nearly 10 meters) will not be a problem.

In October 2012, two physicists at New York University in the United States developed a technique that uses a light beam to pull particles toward the source of the beam, and claimed to have confirmed it experimentally. Professor David Greer and graduate student David Rouvenel of the Center for the Study of Soft Materials in NYU's Department of Physics say they have achieved the Star Trek tractor beam technique, but only in the micrometer range.

However, the technique is still a long way from practical application, and their best experimental result would be to manipulate "laser tweezers" to pull particulate objects across microscopic distances in two dimensions.