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Scientists claim to have discovered a new form of light that could potentially make the fibre optic technology used in internet and network connections faster and more secure.
Upon passing light through crystals during testing, researchers at Trinity College Dublin noticed a new and unexpected property of light based around the concept of 'angular momentum'.
Angular momentum measures how much something is rotating, and physicists have always thought that value was fixed, but noticed that movement of light displayed a new property when passed through crystals during testing.
They claim that photons can have half-integer values of angular momentum, which in turn causes them to be confined to less than three dimensions.
According to Professor John Donegan, the discovery will have real impacts for the study of light waves, particularly "in areas such as secure optical communications".
Professor Paul Eastham, added: "We're interested in finding out how we can change the way light behaves, and how that could be useful."
Faster internet
In making the discovery, researchers use an effect that was discovered in the 1830s by mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and physicist Humphrey Lloyd, which found that when passing through certain crystals, a ray of light became a hollow cylinder.
The present collection of experts was subsequently able to use this discovery to generate beams of light containing a screw-like structure, which when applied to the theories of quantum mechanics, allowed them to predict the angular momentum of the photons involved, and devise an experiment to test that prediction.
By way of a specially constructed device, the team was able to measure the flow of angular momentum in the beam of light, as well any variations in this flow caused by quantum effects.
The team found a tiny shift in the angular momentum of each photon, giving an insight into speculation around how quantum mechanics works for particles that are free to move in only two of the three dimensions of space.
That means that the results of the work are not entirely unexpected, but this experiment does prove the results for the first time.
The breakthrough could be a significant development in heightening speeds and security for fibre optic cabling, which could in turn allow networks to deal with larger and more complex sources of data.
