Recent research highlight: Vortex interactions in light

We are generating, controlling, and measuring topological fluids made purely of light. The transformative idea is to treat optical vortices, whirling phase singularities in the light field that have dark centers and quantized angular momentum, as interacting quasiparticles in an optical quantum fluid. We recently observed the emergence of quantum fluid behavior and interactions between densely-packed vortices in random light waves (i.e. laser speckle, Phys Rev Lett 122: 044301, 2019). These results suggest a world of emergent physics hidden beneath the linear optics that is thought to be so well-understood.

This work was recently funded by the W. M. Keck Foundation!