Our textbook description of light brings our attention to bear on its traditional form as an electromagnetic wave, comprising a wavelength and frequency, amplitude and phase, and with the direction of ...

In a typical visible laser beam, there are potentially many millions of transverse modes per square millimetre 1, an extraordinary resource if it could be exploited. Yet for many years, only Gaussian ...

An exciting prospect in modern optics is to exploit patterns of light—how the light looks in its many degrees of freedom—often referred to as "structured light." Each distinct pattern could form an ...

Light can be tailored, much like cloth, weaving and stitching a pattern into the very fabric of light itself. This so-called structured light allows us to access, harness and exploit all light's ...