When a magnetic material is bombarded with short pulses of laser light, it loses its magnetism within femtoseconds (10 –15 seconds). The spin, or angular momentum, of the electrons in the material ...

Phonons are the collective vibrations that move through a solid. They can be thought of as waves traveling across the atomic ...

Introduction You might have seen figure skaters spinning around quickly and then tucking their arms to spin faster—or opening them to spin more slowly. This happens, thanks to a physics concept known ...

Photons can have half-integer values of angular momentum when they are confined to fewer than three dimensions. That is the conclusion of physicists in Ireland, who have revived an experiment first ...

A pair of photons enters an optical maze, and sometimes they leave as something new. Not new in the everyday sense, since both were still photons when they came out.

In an introductory physics course, there are three big ideas. There is the work-energy principle, the momentum principle and then the angular momentum principle. I'll skip the work-energy principle ...

(a) The effect of permittivity and material rotation angle on the reflection coefficient. (b-c) Asymmetric transmission of vortex waves (positive and negative topological charges) with near-zero ...

Optical vortices are currently one of the most intensively studied topics in optics. These light beams, which carry orbital angular momentum (OAM), have been successfully utilized in the visible and ...