Rather than sucking space ships into a space-station, a tractor beam created by University of Adelaide researcher Ashby Hilton and his colleagues pulls atoms into a microscopic hole at the center of a special optical fiber. Atomic chamber in which tractor beams were created. Image credit: Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing. “Although tractor beams are green or blue in the movies, in this case the trap is made of invisible infrared light,”...
