Make particles wiggle (in a sine wave) I'm trying to model a laser, and I'm using moving particles that are emitters. Using some motion blur, I get something that looks like particles going very quickly. However, I would like to give the impression that this is a laser, so I was thinking about making the particles move in a sinusoidal motion to make them look like little sine waves (a crude rendition of the particle/wave duality of light, I admit.) 

I think that this effect should be achievable if I could make a texture field that would apply an up/down force on the particles. But, I cannot figure out how to define the texture used by the texture field. 

here is what I have so far, showing the laser in red hitting a nanoparticle and ejecting ions (yellow/white). I am using the Cycles renderer.
I would tackle this problem by using a curve guide force field where Kink is set to Wave. Frequency and Amplitude will help you to shape your movement.

I prepared a blend for you that illustrates the behaviour clearly and upload it here 
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/29048

This screenshot should help all of you that don't like to download foreign blend files ;)


Consider that the wave kind is behaving like a sawtooth wave... so maybe you should form your curve guide like the sine wave you'd like to create.

Another way is to use a harmonic field... for a demo of this effect, look here: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/29061 The movements here are less uniform. If you need even more turbulence use the turbulence field on top..