Light, it seems, can be like Shirley Temple’s curls: more twisty than anyone could possibly have imagined.
In a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters, researchers suggest that electromagnetic waves, including light, can possess an excess twistiness beyond what physicists would ordinarily expect. The effect is probably limited to microscopic realms, but scientists had never before even speculated that it could occur.
“There’s this thing in the electromagnetic field that nobody has noticed all this time,” says Adam Cohen, a physical chemist at Harvard University who led the work. “That’s what makes it interesting.”