There’s a paper from 1984 that worked out the math for a two-sail system that could get a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, and slow down and end up in that gravity well, with a 41-year mission time. It would do so by discarding a reflector that points backward at the actual payload with its own sail. The paper also proposes a mechanism for a round trip mission, too, using 3 sails.
There’s a paper from 1984 that worked out the math for a two-sail system that could get a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, and slow down and end up in that gravity well, with a 41-year mission time. It would do so by discarding a reflector that points backward at the actual payload with its own sail. The paper also proposes a mechanism for a round trip mission, too, using 3 sails.