Light Bends by Itself

Light Bends by Itself: In the late 1970s, physicists... discovered that a so-called Airy waveform, a wave describing how quantum particles move, can sometimes bend by a small amount...

...imagine light emitted from a wide strip—perhaps a fluorescent tube or, better, a laser whose output has been expanded. By carefully controlling the initial position of the wave peaks—the phase of the waves—at every step along the strip, it is possible to make the light traveling outward interfere constructively at only points on a curve and cancel out everywhere else. The Airy function, which contains rapid but diminishing oscillations, proved an easy way to define those initial phases—except that the resultant light would bend only up to about 8°.

Now physicists Mordechai Segev and colleagues at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa say they have a recipe for making light self-bend through any angle, even through a complete circle. The problem with the Airy function, says Segev, is that the shape of its oscillations specify the right phases only at small angles; at angles much greater than 8°, the shape becomes a crude approximation... After laborious mathematics and guesswork, the researchers found solutions to Maxwell's equations that precisely describe the initial phases required for truly self-bending light...