Light can carry angular momentum in two distinct ways. One comes from polarization, which describes how the electric field ...

Light is not supposed to behave like a trapped whirlpool, yet researchers have now shown that it can do exactly that inside a ...

A routine quantum optics technique just revealed an extraordinary secret: entangled light can carry incredibly complex ...

With a new lab-based experiment, researchers in the UK and France have recreated the characteristic cascades of energy and angular momentum that underpin key features of Earth's atmosphere. Reporting ...

Photons can have half-integer values of angular momentum when they are confined to fewer than three dimensions. That is the conclusion of physicists in Ireland, who have revived an experiment first ...

In an introductory physics course, there are three big ideas. There is the work-energy principle, the momentum principle and then the angular momentum principle. I'll skip the work-energy principle ...

We live and die by data these days. Data rates and latencies are everything, with data centers and chips designed to maximize communication speeds. The hero in the world of data is the optical fiber.

Introduction You might have seen figure skaters spinning around quickly and then tucking their arms to spin faster—or opening them to spin more slowly. This happens, thanks to a physics concept known ...