Although solar-powered devices are now fairly common, Swedish scientists have created something a little different. They’ve built tiny “metavehicles” that are mechanically propelled and guided via waves of light.
Led by Prof. Mikael Käll and former PhD student Daniel Andrén, a team at the Chalmers University of Technology constructed the vehicles by coating microscopic particles with what are known as “meta-surfaces.” The latter are described by the university as “carefully designed and ordered nanoparticles, tailored to direct light in interesting and unusual ways.”
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