Möbius strips can easily be made at home – just take a strip of paper, give it a half-twist and then join its ends together. Trivial as it may sound, this loop possesses the unusual property of having only one surface and one edge. They also appear very rarely in nature and had never before been seen in light. Now, an international group of physicists has created such shapes using the polarization of laser light, and the researchers say that these electromagnetic patterns could be used to build new kinds of small-scale structure such as metamaterials.
The possibility of making an optical Möbius strip was suggested in 2005 by Isaac Freund of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Freund calculated that a pair of laser beams could be manipulated such that the axis along which their combined electric fields oscillates – the polarization vector – would trace out a Möbius strip. He proposed using beams with different spin and orbital angular momenta, and making them interfere at specific angles to one another. The spin – or circular polarization – of an electromagnetic wave involves its polarization rotating clockwise or anticlockwise in a circle that is normal to the direction of propagation. Orbital angular momentum, on the other hand, comes from the twisting of a beam's wavefront around its propagation axis.
Sabre (Julian) 92.5% Stock 04 STI
Good choice putting $4,000 rims on your 1990 Honda Civic. That's like Betty White going out and getting her tits done.
Sabre (Julian) 92.5% Stock 04 STI
Good choice putting $4,000 rims on your 1990 Honda Civic. That's like Betty White going out and getting her tits done.
