And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Genesis 1:3
"A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain and the U.S. has announced that they have discovered a new property of light—self-torque.
Scientists have long known about such properties of light as wavelength. More recently, researchers have found that light can also be twisted, a property called angular momentum.
Beams with highly structured angular momentum are said to have orbital angular momentum (OAM), and are called vortex beams.
They appear as a helix surrounding a common center, and when they strike a flat surface, they appear as doughnut-shaped.
In this new effort, the researchers were working with OAM beams when they found the light behaving in a way that had never been seen before.
The experiments involved firing two lasers at a cloud of argon gas—doing so forced the beams to overlap, and they joined and were emitted as a single beam from the other side of the argon cloud. The result was a type of vortex beam.
The researchers then wondered what would happen if the lasers had different orbital angular momentum and if they were slightly out of sync.
This resulted in a beam that looked like a corkscrew with a gradually changing twist.
And when the beam struck a flat surface, it looked like a crescent moon.
The researchers noted that looked at another way, a single photon at the front of the beam was orbiting around its center more slowly than a photon at the back of the beam. The researchers promptly dubbed the new property self-torque—and not only is it a newly discovered property of light, it is also one that has never even been predicted."
Phys.Org
Genesis 1:3
"A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain and the U.S. has announced that they have discovered a new property of light—self-torque.
Scientists have long known about such properties of light as wavelength. More recently, researchers have found that light can also be twisted, a property called angular momentum.
Beams with highly structured angular momentum are said to have orbital angular momentum (OAM), and are called vortex beams.
They appear as a helix surrounding a common center, and when they strike a flat surface, they appear as doughnut-shaped.
In this new effort, the researchers were working with OAM beams when they found the light behaving in a way that had never been seen before.
The experiments involved firing two lasers at a cloud of argon gas—doing so forced the beams to overlap, and they joined and were emitted as a single beam from the other side of the argon cloud. The result was a type of vortex beam.
The researchers then wondered what would happen if the lasers had different orbital angular momentum and if they were slightly out of sync.
This resulted in a beam that looked like a corkscrew with a gradually changing twist.
And when the beam struck a flat surface, it looked like a crescent moon.
The researchers noted that looked at another way, a single photon at the front of the beam was orbiting around its center more slowly than a photon at the back of the beam. The researchers promptly dubbed the new property self-torque—and not only is it a newly discovered property of light, it is also one that has never even been predicted."
Phys.Org
