{"id":211729,"date":"2025-04-18T02:15:26","date_gmt":"2025-04-18T07:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/tying-light-from-lasers-into-stable-optical-knots"},"modified":"2025-04-18T02:15:26","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T07:15:26","slug":"tying-light-from-lasers-into-stable-optical-knots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/tying-light-from-lasers-into-stable-optical-knots","title":{"rendered":"Tying light from lasers into stable \u2018optical knots\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/tying-light-from-lasers-into-stable-optical-knots2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Knots are generally understood to form due to twists and turns of long, flexible materials that keep shoes on your feet or frustrate your attempts at hanging holiday decorations. A beam of light doesn\u2019t sound like a material that can create a knot.<\/p>\n<p>But it is.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine throwing several rocks into a pond all at once. At a certain point on the water\u2019s surface, the resulting ripple rings would all mix to form a complex pattern. Now imagine being able to control the shape and speed of each ring. With enough planning, you could get that mesh point to form <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/complex+shapes\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">complex shapes<\/a> in 3D on demand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Knots are generally understood to form due to twists and turns of long, flexible materials that keep shoes on your feet or frustrate your attempts at hanging holiday decorations. A beam of light doesn\u2019t sound like a material that can create a knot. But it is. Imagine throwing several rocks into a pond all at [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}