{"id":234201,"date":"2026-03-28T03:16:38","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T08:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/physicists-create-laser-tornado-in-miniature-structures-using-synthetic-magnetic-field"},"modified":"2026-03-28T03:16:38","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T08:16:38","slug":"physicists-create-laser-tornado-in-miniature-structures-using-synthetic-magnetic-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/physicists-create-laser-tornado-in-miniature-structures-using-synthetic-magnetic-field","title":{"rendered":"Physicists create laser tornado in miniature structures using synthetic magnetic field"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/physicists-create-laser-tornado-in-miniature-structures-using-synthetic-magnetic-field.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Can light behave like a whirlwind? It turns out it can\u2014and such \u201coptical tornadoes\u201d have now been created in an extremely small structure by scientists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology, and the Institut Pascal CNRS at Universit\u00e9 Clermont Auvergne. This discovery opens a new pathway for creating miniature light sources with complex structures, potentially enabling the development of simpler and more scalable photonic devices in the future, for applications such as optical communication and quantum technologies. The research is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/sciadv.aeb6167\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Science Advances.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur solution combines several fields of physics, from quantum mechanics, through materials engineering, to optics and solid-state physics,\u201d explains Prof. Jacek Szczytko from the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2023-07-physicists-complex.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">Faculty of Physics<\/a> at the University of Warsaw, the leader of the research group. \u201cThe inspiration came from systems known from <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2024-07-atoms-photonic-transistors.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">atomic physics<\/a>, where electrons can occupy different energy states. In photonics, a similar role is played by optical traps, which confine light instead of electrons.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou can think of it as an optical vortex,\u201d says Dr. Marcin Muszy\u0144ski from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw and Department of Physics City College of New York, the first author of the study. \u201cThe light wave twists around its axis, and its phase changes in a spiral manner. Moreover, even the polarization\u2014the direction of oscillation of the electric field\u2014begins to rotate.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Can light behave like a whirlwind? It turns out it can\u2014and such \u201coptical tornadoes\u201d have now been created in an extremely small structure by scientists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology, and the Institut Pascal CNRS at Universit\u00e9 Clermont Auvergne. This discovery opens a new pathway [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[493,38,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climatology","category-engineering","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234201","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=234201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}