Posted on 06/28/2019 5:19:41 PM PDT by BenLurkin
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
The chick in the video is hot.
I knew someone would beat me.
Thanks BenLurkin.
Ahem, women wear contacts. You know, to keep the “self-torque” problem discreet.
If only you could cross two posts and they came out as one...
And never, NEVER, pee on the third rail!
Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.
Oliver Heaviside:
A self-taught mathematician, admitted mama’s boy who lived with his mom. He is known for taking James Clerk Maxwells 200 field equations with Josiah Willard and calling them “abominations”, discarded all but four which he transformed into vector equations, thus giving us all we know about the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
Only Nicola Tesla tried to make sense of some of the rest of Maxwell’s field equations - among them, his attempt to create a broadcast power station. And his invention of alternating current (transmitted power) - Edison only discovered direct current (stored power).
Without Maxwell, Tesla would have been just another mad scientist of the period, and Einstein would have been a postal clerk or a comedian, assuming he fled Germany in the first place.
See: The Man Who Changed Everything
The Life of James Clerk Maxwell
by Basil Mahonr
See: Oliver Heaviside
The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age
by Paul J Nahin
I’m with you - but I think the gist is that light is neat and does weird things if you play with it.
Wow! That is very interesting. Thank you for posting that article. It seems that we really don’t know squat.
I remember someone in physics class singing, “Dr. Maxwell and his 200 equations made sure that I was dead, ding ding”.
Nice played
From the article: More recently, researchers have found that light can also be twisted, a property called angular momentum.
Hm - recently - this article is from 1940: On the current and the density of the electric charge, the energy, the linear momentum and the angular momentum of arbitrary fields
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003189144090091X
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.