This was posted to the vort list and has interesting
tieins to Chladni type sound produced geometries as
used in the cymatics research of Dr. Hans Jenny and
Peter Guy Manners;
-------------
Laser light vortexes at extremely high outputs
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/07/990713074413.htm
Whirlpools Of Light Offer Speedy Data Transmission
HAIFA, Israel, and NEW YORK, N.Y.
July 6, 1999 -- Two reseachers at the Technion-Israel
Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, have
discovered that small lasers can produce complex
patterns of tiny optical vortices, whirlpools of light
less than ten thousandth of an inch across.
The finding, which will be published in the July 9
Science, could be used as the basis of new methods of
high speed data transmission and processing.
The Technion team, Drs. Meir Orenstein and Jacob
Scheuer, used lasers called VCSELs (vertical cavity
surface-emitting lasers), which produce laser light
over a surface some 20 microns on a side (about a
thousand of an inch).
The Technion team, however, modified the lasers by
doubling their size and increasing the current fed
into them by three to six-fold, which causes the laser
beam to break up and organize itself into the complex
patterns observed.
Like any laser, the VCSEL operates by bouncing light
back and forth between mirrors in a material that
amplifies the light. But in the conditions used in the
experiment, the amount of light produced changed how
much the light is amplified, in turn changing the
amount of light at any point. In this way the material
itself builds up patterns of light and dark.
"What we observed were regular arrays of optical
vortices" Dr. Orenstein explains.
An optical vortex is like a tornado in air or the
whirlpool formed around a bathroom drain, except that
it is made of light. Light is an electro-magnetic wave
and in an optical vortex, the direction of the wave
motion rotates around a central axis, like water
around a drain; the closer to the axis, that faster
the rotation. In an optical vortex, unlike a fluid
vortex, this velocity rises without limit as the
center is approached.
The Technion experiments showed that the vortices
spontaneously formed patterns of figure-eights and
arrays of three, five and seven vortices as the
researchers increased the current to the tiny laser.
The vortices are extremely interesting theoretically
because vortex structure appears so widely in nature
in gases, fluids, the magnetized gas called plasmas
and even in living things, as in the helix of DNA.
While Orenstein and Scheuer believe they understand
how the vortices arise in the laser, it is still not
clear why this particular pattern occurs rather than
others.
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