Inventing the Tractor Beam

NASA Studying Ways to Make ‘Tractor Beams’ a Reality (with video)

“Tractor beams — the ability to trap and move objects using laser light — are the stuff of science fiction, but a team of NASA scientists has won funding to study the concept for remotely capturing planetary or atmospheric particles and delivering them to a robotic rover or orbiting spacecraft for analysis.”

Backward Pulling Force from a Forward Propagating Beam, Chen et al

“We show explicitly that the necessary condition to realize a negative (pulling) optical force is the simultaneous excitation of multipoles in the particle and if the projection of the total photon momentum along the propagation direction is small (as in some propagation invariant beams), attractive optical force is possible. This possibility adds “pulling” as an additional degree of freedom to optical micromanipulation.”

Tractor beam, Wikipedia