New Property of Light Discovered

by Bob Yirka, Science X Network, Phys.org

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

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—self-torque. A new property of light beams, the self-torque of light, which is associated to a temporal variation of the orbital angular momentum. Credit: JILA (USA) Rebecca Jacobson, Servicio de Produccion e Innovacion Digital – Universidad de Salamanca (Spain)
The researchers suggest that it should be possible to use their technique to modulate the orbital angular momentum of light in ways very similar to modulating frequencies in communications equipment.

Source: phys.org