The Darkness Within Light

How can something exist in two distinct forms at the same time? Physics clearly states that light experiences particle-wave duality, while common sense tells us this is impossible. However, all objects no matter how massive behave in a particle-wave manner. And why is the speed of light the maximum possible speed in the universe? Light is still hiding great mysteries even today. A similar weird behavior experienced by light is a property recently discovered called darkness inside light.

It is baffling only to associate darkness with light, not to talk about discovering it in the light. Nonetheless, researchers from the University of Glasgow, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Bristol, have proved that indeed natural light fields create optical vortices within, which can be observed in the form of black points inside light. Further still, the phenomenon seems to be a universal property directly associated with the Brownian characteristics of matter.

I'm sure everyone reading this article has had at least a laser pointer, I for one had about three. While pointing the laser towards you forehead, one can see that the highly coherent light beam emerging from the aperture actually has a speckled or dotted appearance. The same phenomenon can be observed while pointing the laser towards a target in your close proximity. I'm sure most of you have remained perplexed by the phenomenon, not knowing what causes it. As it turns out, this dotted appearance of monochromatic coherent light waves is generated by an interference pattern within the beam of light.

A close observation would actually reveal that the light dots, generated by the laser light beam, appear to sparkle in a unique way while moving in relation to the target lit by the laser. With the help of a 10-mm-diameter helium neon laser, the UK scientists have successfully created such dotted patterns on a screen of ground glass. Numerical simulations and experiments were used to create a model of the superpositions, which determine the appearance of the dotted beam of light.

By doing so, scientists finally created a 3D map of the structure of the optical vortices that determine the appearance of dark within the beam on light. In seems that about 73 percent of the dark vortices are determined by infinite vortex lines spanning the whole structure of the beam, while the other 27 percent are created by vortices forming closed loops.

The dark lines inside the beam of light seem to experience scale invariance, which basically means that no matter how far you zoom in and out, the dotted features remain the same, property called fractality, which is of Brownian nature.

However, this is not all. Upon further investigation, scientists observed that the properties of the optical vortices within the beam of light were somehow similar to those of the cosmic strings predicted by string theory. Cosmic strings are defined as one-dimensional structures which are defects of the fabric of space-time. According to the string theory, they can be found throughout the whole universe, have extremely powerful gravitational fields – a cosmic string about 5 kilometers in diameter could in fact have a gravitational pull equivalent to that of the Sun – and may have played a crucial role in the formation of the galaxies.



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