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Thursday, December 2, 2010

Optical manipulation of light-absorbing particles takes to the air

Ashley G. Smart

The idea that light can move matter is not new—Johannes Keplersuspected as much some 400 years ago when he noticed that the tails of comets always point away from the Sun. That suspicion was formalized in 1871 with James Clerk Maxwell's prediction of radiation pressure—the force imparted on a body by refracted, reflected, or absorbed light—and confirmed in 1900, when Pyotr Lebedev observed the effect in experiments.

DOI

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