Vortex knots in light

By Jonathan Leach, Mark R. Dennis, Johannes Courtial, Miles J. Padgett. 2004

240 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Optical vortices generically arise when optical beams are combined. Recently, we reported how several laser beams containing optical vortices could be combined to form optical vortex loops, links and knots embedded in a light beam (Leach et al 2004 Nature 432 165). Here, we describe in detail the experiments in which vortex loops form these structures. The experimental construction follows a theoretical model originally proposed by Berry and Dennis, and the beams are synthesized using a programmable spatial light modulator and imaged using a CCD camera.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e02e563c2f3018c02083a743c7ecd8758641ee7

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Computational Mechanics

Citations in the corpus

Experimental high-dimensional two-photon entanglement and violations of generalized Bell inequalities (2011, methodology): “The hologram generation algorithm introduced in [27] is applied to configure the SLMs.”
Tying quantum knots (2015, background): “Recent experiments have observed knots in a variety of classical contexts, including nematic liquid crystals [5–7], DNA [8], optical beams [9, 10], and water [11].”
Tailoring of arbitrary optical vector beams (2007, background): “its local diffraction efficiency) with this amplitude profile [23].”
Adaptive-optics-based simultaneous pre- and post-turbulence compensation of multiple orbital-angular-momentum beams in a bidirectional free-space optical link (2014, methodology): “Another beam (branch 2) is converted into a superposition of two equally-weighted OAM beams (with l 3, 7, or l 1, 9), by loading the other half of SLM-1 with an appropriately designed phase hologram [30].”
Orbital angular momentum: origins, behavior and applications (2011, methodology): “This technique was used prior to any interest in OAM [52] but has since been used effectively to create many precise superpositions, including those associated with the generation of vortex lines, which are themselves linked and knotted [53,54], or precise modal measurements in quantum entanglement ”
Isolated optical vortex knots (2010, background): “The light propagating from the hologram has a phase pattern determined by the shape of the grating lines on the hologram, and intensity determined by their contras”