Ok, so here's something I thought was cool. I heard today that some scientists, particularly Dr. Mark Dennis from the University of Bristol and Professor Miles Padgett from Glasgow University tied some light into a knot.

Woa.

Seriously though, here's the idea behind it, simplified to an extreme.
There are these things called optical vortices. To reduce it to the ridiculous, its like making light kind of spiral out in a direction rather than in a straight line. I suppose you could use the analogy of a toy slinky, with the slinky rings being the light and all going in one direction. What you would see if you shone that light on something flat like a wall would be a ring of light rather than a single beam.

Ok, so these guys took this to the next level as I understand it by creating optical vortices, and then manipulating them into knots.

So for those of you who are a bit behind, to sum it up some dudes made light travel in a spiral, then tied that into knots. Yeah, that. What did you do today?

So what?
Well....
The thing about optical vortices is that they can actually induce torque from the spiraling effect, depending on how many twists the light does in one wavelength and the more spirals (higher number of twists) the faster the light is spinning around the axis so the more torque it has. They can also be used to trap, manipulate, and even transform small volumes of matter.

Lets not get it twisted, (Ha ha, see what I did there?) we aren't talking about much force. Its enough force to work on a micrometer scale. Think of micrometer scale bulldozers, or micro pumps with no moving parts, or sorting or mixing particles and stuff like that.

What else? Well, computers use electrons which have two states, zero and one. That's 1 and 0... You know, binary. That's how they work. Now you have the possibility of quantum computing that uses light to encode and store information, and optical vortices theoretically have an infinite number of states because there is no limit to the topological charge (how many twists the light does in one wavelength) so this could lead to faster data manipulation and higher bandwidth. There's even talk of using this technology on radio waves to reduce radio-frequency congestion. Im not even going to get into that right now. Long story short(er) there's a ton of cool stuff you can do with this.

Ok, I hear you now writing me emails... "Yeah Halla, but that was all doable before this whole knot tying thing. So whats the big deal?"

The big deal is the fact that tying these optical vortices in knots proves we have much more advanced optical control, and so we can now do even more with optical vortices than previously thought.

For example you can manipulate these optical vortices to project hundreds or thousands of simultaneous three dimensional configurations, each with unique characteristics and make some seriously sophisticated nano-craziness, and who only knows what else.

I thought it was cool. Hopefully you do too.
Here are some links on the topic to blow your mind and/or waste your day:


http://www.physics.nyu.edu/grierlab/hot.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... screwed-up
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_vortex
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences ... t-in-knots

Later people!
(PS - H4z3, you were the tie-breaker on this post. I hope you liked it. Now build me some nanobots!)