Twisting of light around rotating black holes

By Fabrizio Tamburini, B. Thid'e, G. Molina-Terriza, G. Anzolin. 2011

318 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Kerr black holes are among the most intriguing predictions of Einstein's general relativity theory(1,2). These rotating massive astrophysical objects drag and intermix their surrounding space and time, deflecting and phase-modifying light emitted near them. We have found that this leads to a new relativistic effect that imprints orbital angular momentum on such light. Numerical experiments, based on the integration of the null geodesic equations of light from orbiting point-like sources in the Kerr black hole equatorial plane to an asymptotic observer(3), indeed identify the phase change and wavefront warping and predict the associated light-beam orbital angular momentum spectra(4). Setting up the best existing telescopes properly, it should be possible to detect and measure this twisted light, thus allowing a direct observational demonstration of the existence of rotating black holes. As non-rotating objects are more an exception than a rule in the Universe, our findings are of fundamental importance.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17e7cb5918bc3c4391911db89e3bf28ce6a74308

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Citations in the corpus

Raman Techniques: Fundamentals and Frontiers (2019, background): “Twisted Laguerre-Gaussian lasers, with orbital angular momentum (OAM) and characterised by doughnutshaped intensity profiles, are of great interest to a number of growing research fields such as ultra-cold atoms [262–264], microscopy and imaging [265, 266], atomic and nanoparticle manipulation [267,”
Spin-to-orbital conversion of the angular momentum of light and its classical and quantum applications (2011, background): “Another interesting case of optical spin–orbit coupling occurs in the curved spacetime geometry surrounding a rotating black hole, as demonstrated very recently in [115].”
Measurement of the spin of the M87 black hole from its observed twisted light (2019, methodology): “Furthermore, from the asymmetry parameter q of the observed OAM spectrum we can to determine the sense and magnitude of the rotation of the M87* and its inclination, verifying the theoretical predictions made by Tamburini et al. (2011a).”
Theory and applications of free-electron vortex states (2017, background): “munications [41, 42], astronomy and astrophysics [43, 44, 45, 46, 47], optical solitons [48, 49, 50], and Hall effects [51, 52, 53, 54].”
Electron vortices: Beams with orbital angular momentum (2017, background): “, 2007; Yao and Padgett, 2011) and astronomy (Lee et al., 2006; Tamburini et al., 2011; Thidé et al., 2007).”