Scientists hope breakthrough will enable space vehicles to manoeuvre solely via Sun's rays.
A time-lapse photo of a microscopic rod lit by a laser from below shows transverse movement, demonstrating lift.
Physicists in the United States have demonstrated the optical analogue of an aerofoil — a 'lightfoil' that generates lift when passing through laser light.
The demonstration, which comes more than a century after the development of the first aeroplanes, suggests that lightfoils could one day be used to manoeuvre objects in the vacuum of outer space using only the Sun's rays. "It's almost like the first stages of what the Wright brothers did," says lead author Grover Swartzlander, a physicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, whose study appears in Nature Photonics today.
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