TECH HEALTH ENVIRONMENT SPACE HUMANS PHYSICS NATURE

VIDEO

Harvard Scientists Have

Unlocked Unexpected New
States of Light
Nothing in nature can do this.
MICHELLE STARR 11 NOV 2017

Light is ubiquitous and vital, but also

incredibly strange - and it's possible we'll
never exhaust the opportunities to learn
more about it.

Case in point: researchers at Harvard have

developed a material that can generate and
maintain completely new and more complex
states of light.
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The tool uses polarisation to generate

structures such as swirling vortices, spirals,
and corkscrews that not only help explore
light's properties, but also have potential
practical applications, such as high-powered
imaging.

Discoveries about light are still being made.

It was only in 2015 that scientists took the
�rst-ever photograph of light behaving as
both a particle and a wave.

And it hasn't even been that long - just 1992,

25 years ago - since light was discovered to
have orbital angular momentum.

This is angular momentum based on the

shape of its wavefront, rather than its
orientation. The new tool - a type of
metasurface - uses this along with second
type of angular momentum called spin
angular momentum (also known as circular
polarisation).

"Think about orbital angular momentum and

circular polarisation like the motion of a
planet," writes Harvard's Leah Burrows in a
statement.

"Circular polarisation is the direction in

which a planet rotates on its axis while
orbital momentum describes how the planet
orbits the sun."

It's previously been established that a single

beam of light can exhibit both types of
angular momentum, and that connecting
them and using polarisation to control the
OAM can result in beams with new and
complex shapes, such as the
aforementioned corkscrew.

According to the researchers, until now

there was a signi�cant limit on this. Only
certain polarisations could connect to certain
OAMs.

This is where the new tool comes in - it

allows any polarisation to be converted to
any OAM, which means it can create spirals
and corkscrews and vortices of any size.

"This is a completely new optical

component," said co-�rst researcher Antonio
Ambrosio, Principal Scientist at Harvard
Center for Nanoscale Systems.

"Some metasurfaces are iterations or more

e�cient, more compact versions of existing
optical devices but, this arbitrary spin-to-
orbital conversion cannot be done with any
other optical device.

"There is nothing in nature as well that can

do this and produce these states of light."

(Capasso Lab/Harvard SEAS)

Orbital angular momentum already has

several proposed uses, such as high-speed
data transfer, and encoded
communications. Researchers have even
�gured out how to transmit the OAM of
individual photons using entanglement.

Other previously proposed applications

include the manipulation of microscopic
objects, and imaging systems.

This is where Harvard's device could prove

practical. The metasurface could be used to
shape optical tweezers to manipulate objects
as small as atoms and molecules. Changing
the polarisation could change the direction
of the applied force.

It could also be used for high-powered

imaging, because the black hole down the
centre of the vortex can be used to take
images of features smaller than the
di�raction limit, the researchers said.

"There is interest in these beams in quantum

optics and quantum information," explained
co-�rst researcher Noah Rubin.

"On the more applied side, these beams

could �nd application in free-space optical
communication, especially in scattering
environments where this is usually di�cult.

"Moreover, it has been recently shown that

similar elements can be incorporated into
lasers, directly producing these novel states
of light. This may lead to unforeseen
applications."

Harvard has legally protected all IP related to

the project and is currently seeking
commercialisation opportunities. The
research itself has been published in the
journal Science.

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