As they travel through space, some light beams rotate. Such light beams have angular
momentum. There are two particularly important ways in which a light beam can rotate: if …

Both classical and quantum waves can form vortices: entities with helical phase fronts and
circulating current densities. These features determine the intrinsic orbital angular …

What is singular optics? This new branch of modern physical optics deals with a wide class
of effects associated with phase singularities in wave fields, as well as with the topology of …

Some 16 years ago, Allen et al.[Phys. Rev. A 45, 8185 (1992)] recognised that laser beams
which carried an angular momentum additional to photon spin, could be realized in the …

Publisher Summary The widespread availability of spatially and temporally coherent laser
sources makes the production of optical vortices inevitable in any experiment involving …

For scalar light, the current is the familiar expectation value of the intensity-weighted
momentum operator. Current is distinct from the local wavevector (not weighted) that could …

Polarization patterns in the transverse plane generically contain singularities: points of
circular polarization (C points), lines of linear polarization (L lines), instantaneous zeros …

Speckle study constitutes a multidisciplinary area with inherent complexities. In order to
conquer challenges such as the variability of samples and sensitive measurements …

Following Nye & Hajnal, we explore the geometry of complex vector waves by regarding
them as a field of polarization ellipses. Singularities of this field are the C lines and L lines …

Two types of point singularities in the polarization of a paraxial Gaussian laser beam are
discussed in detail. V-points, which are vector point singularities where the direction of the …