Light can carry angular momentum in two distinct ways. One comes from polarization, which describes how the electric field ...

A routine quantum optics technique just revealed an extraordinary secret: entangled light can carry incredibly complex ...

Photons can have half-integer values of angular momentum when they are confined to fewer than three dimensions. That is the conclusion of physicists in Ireland, who have revived an experiment first ...

Light is not supposed to behave like a trapped whirlpool, yet researchers have now shown that it can do exactly that inside a ...

In an introductory physics course, there are three big ideas. There is the work-energy principle, the momentum principle and then the angular momentum principle. I'll skip the work-energy principle ...

Optical holography is a powerful method for recording and reconstructing complete optical field information, including intensity and phase. It has found extensive applications in various fields, such ...

When a magnetic material is bombarded with short pulses of laser light, it loses its magnetism within femtoseconds (10 –15 seconds). The spin, or angular momentum, of the electrons in the material ...

Introduction You might have seen figure skaters spinning around quickly and then tucking their arms to spin faster—or opening them to spin more slowly. This happens, thanks to a physics concept known ...

We live and die by data these days. Data rates and latencies are everything, with data centers and chips designed to maximize communication speeds. The hero in the world of data is the optical fiber.