{"id":92820,"date":"2019-06-28T11:42:41","date_gmt":"2019-06-28T18:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/new-property-of-light-discovered"},"modified":"2019-06-30T05:20:52","modified_gmt":"2019-06-30T12:20:52","slug":"new-property-of-light-discovered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/new-property-of-light-discovered","title":{"rendered":"New property of light discovered"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2014self-torque. In their paper published in the journal Science<\/i>, the group describes how they happened to spot the new property and possible uses for it.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Beams with highly structured angular momentum are said to have orbital angular momentum (OAM), and are called vortex beams<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

The experiments involved firing two lasers at a cloud of argon gas\u2014doing 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<\/a>, it looked like a crescent moon. The researchers noted that looked at another way, a single photon<\/a> at the front of the beam was orbiting around its center more slowly than a photon at the back of the beam<\/a>. The researchers promptly dubbed the new property self-torque\u2014and not only is it a newly discovered property of light, it is also one that has never even been predicted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2014self-torque. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they happened to spot the new property and possible uses for it. Scientists have long known about such properties [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92820","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\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92820"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92870,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92820\/revisions\/92870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}