HENRI LEZEC has a problem. He has been trying to use the tiny pressure exerted by light to move miniscule mechanical components. A light-powered micromachine could have all sorts of uses but Lezec, a photonics researcher at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, hasn’t had much luck getting them to work. Frustratingly, the components keep sticking to the optical fibre that is beaming light at them.
Lezec is by no means alone in falling foul of what nanotechnologists call “stiction” – the collective term (derived from “static friction”) for a variety of physical forces…
