From science fiction death rays to supermarket scanners, lasers have become deeply embedded in our daily lives and our culture. But in recent decades the standard laser beam has evolved into an array of more specialized light beams with a variety of strange and counterintuitive properties. Some of them have the ability to reconstruct themselves after disruption by an obstacle, while others can bend in complicated shapes or rotate like a corkscrew. These unusual optical effects open new and...
Topology is the study of properties of geometrical objects that remain invariant as the object is bent, twisted, or otherwise continuously deformed. It has been an indispensable tool in particle physics and solid state physics for decades, but in recent years it has become increasingly relevant in classical and quantum optics as well. It makes appearances through such diverse phenomena as Pancharatnam-Berry phases, optical vortices and solitons, and optical simulations of solid-state topological...
