We’ve all played with a spring toy at least once, but did you know that light can also be shaped like a spring?
An international team of researchers, led by Marco Piccardo, a former researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and now a Professor in the Physics Department of Técnico Lisboa and Principal Investigator at the Engineering Institute for Microsystems and Nanotechnologies (INESC MN), has used ultrafast optics and structured light to synthesize a new family of spatiotemporal light beams in the laboratory, known as light springs.
The research was conducted in collaboration between IIT, Politecnico di Milano, and Técnico Lisboa. The discovery has the potential to disrupt applications in photonics with complex light, such as time-resolved microscopy (useful, for example, to produce movies depicting the motion of molecules and viruses), laser-plasma acceleration, and free-space (e.g., in the atmosphere) optical communications.
The research is published in Nature Photonics.
In ultrafast optics, it is possible to shorten or elongate the duration of extremely short optical pulses—down to a few femtoseconds, or thousandths of billionths of a second—or even produce complex pulses, by means of a technique known as pulse shaping. A central idea to this principle is that short laser pulses are composed of a large range of colors.
2023-06-10 10:30:04
Article from phys.org rnrn
