GETTING BENT: The beam travels along a curved trajectory and leaves a bent plasma channel in its wake.
Image: © SCIENCE/AAAS
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Ultra-intense lasers hold much promise for improving scientific tools such as laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), and deepening researchers' understanding of atomic, molecular, optical and plasma physics. The enormous intensity of these lasers (attributed to the brief but powerful pulses of energy they emit), however, makes it difficult for scientists to fully characterize and understand them.
Researchers at the University of Arizona in Tucson (U.A.) and the University of Central Florida in Orlando (U.C.F.) report in Science this week that they have found a way to bend a high-intensity pulsed laser beam, a breakthrough they are hoping will help them better understand how ultra-intense laser pulses travel through the air and find potential new uses for the technology.
"People expect lasers to do certain things, like propagate in a straight line," says lead researcher Pavel Polynkin, an associate research professor at U.A.'s College of Optical Sciences. "The fact that a laser beam actually curves is quite unusual."
Polynkin and his colleagues were the first to report bending the beam of a pulsed laser. But a U.C.F. team of scientists (including current study co-authors Demetri Christodoulides and Georgios Siviloglou) in November 2007 demonstrated a continuous wave (or steady stream) laser that curved slightly, turning on its ear the assumption that lasers can travel only in straight lines.
The U.C.F. researchers dubbed the set of waveforms making up this curved laser the "Airy" beam, after English mathematician and astronomer Sir George Biddell Airy , who in the 1820s first articulated the science behind rainbows.
Rather than use a steady-stream laser beam, Polynkin and his team used a high-intensity laser that emits short blasts of light, also called "light bullets," with each blast only 35 femtoseconds in duration. (A femtosecond is equal to one quadrillionth of a second.) Directly from the laser, these bullets are round (about 0.4 inch, or one centimeter, in diameter) and short (about 10 microns), corresponding to the ultrashort duration of the pulses. They resemble pennies, although much thinner and traveling at a speed of light. The researchers reshaped the profile of these pulses into that of an Airy beam using a thin plate of glass with a particular variation of thickness across the plate. "The phase shifts introduced by this plate turn the bullets from round in shape to the Airy beam that looks more like a triangle," Polynkin says.
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13 Comments
Add CommentIt sounds like the quantum equivalent of shearing force where
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe path of least resistence is a curve!
This is really cool, I heard something a while back about light getting bent around a copper sphere to a small degree but this is completely different. It has enormous applications if they can do it with a low power laser. The military would surely benefit from lasers that can bend themselves.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisresearchers observe a laser beam bending which seems to defy the laws of physics. However they have discovered the reason for this odd observation.......
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswith the general decline of most forms of reporting to glamorization and sensationalism....please Sciam...resist the temptation.
"Researchers defy the laws of physics....."
please see above
you have for generations been a place for those of us who wish to to understand scientific discoveries,theories,and advancing knowlege, to turn to for balenced reporting .
if i want glamor ill watch ET
balanced
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisoops...forget et ...Ill find my dictionary
balanced
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisoops..forget et...ill find my dictionary
balanced
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisoops..forget et...I'll find my dictionary
I read the dek and wanted to make sure candide had commented but I see he has a rival.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have read that it is imposible to transform lighting,but what if you were to direct a lighting bolt to a large ceramic lined pool of water whose purity has yet to be determend by experiment. Now in this pool you have 1000's of conductors to allow the energy to disapate,but create large amonts of heat energy in the pool that can coverted in to steam for the production of electricity. Free clean energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is me again sorry about my mistake where the can be converted in my coment,and your welcome,to scima editors for printing my coment.My spelling and prose may not be the best,but I hope you got my point made and somebody out there will make us of it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow even light can be placed on the disabled list. I wonder if light can draw disability. jla
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is too bad a journal of the caliber of Scientific American is incapable of using scientific notation like 10^-15 instead of using unfathomable expressions like 1 quadrillionth. Thank goodness for metric prefixes like femto!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn a discontinuous universe light from within atomic processes defines linear external space relative to the inner spherical space of an atom. There is no continuum. This can account for the bending of lasers under special circumstances. See www.cosmic-mindreach.com.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthat is good!
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