Physicists discover a new form of light

[Brian]

http://phys.org/news/2016-05-physicists.html

 

(I think the headline is misleading but the experiment is significant.)

[zerostao]

if only vmarco were here

[Zhongyongdaoist]

http://phys.org/news/2016-05-physicists.html

 

(I think the headline is misleading but the experiment is significant.)

 

Late in the article it notes:

 

To make this discovery, the team involved used an effect discovered in the same institution almost 200 years before. In the 1830s, mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and physicist Humphrey Lloyd found that, upon passing through certain crystals, a ray of light became a hollow cylinder.

The team used this phenomenon to generate beams of light with a screw-like structure.

 

Yes, bearing in mind that part of the effect was discovered in the early Nineteenth Century, describing it as new, is misleading, but you are also right that it is very significant, particularly bearing in mind that the distinction between bosons and fermions is just such a 'half spin":

 

. . . particles with integer spin are bosons, while particles with half-integer spin are fermions. (Wikipedia on fermions)

 

and involves also Plancks Constant.

 

Maybe this is why they are talking about a "new form of light", because fermions and bosons have very different properties, though it may be a matter of the problem involved in questions of "discovery", between the observation of a phenomena and its explanation.

[Wells]

.

Edited June 4, 2016 by Wells

[joeblast]

[Bearded Dragon]

I tend to be highly skeptical of anything that hasn't been reproduced by others, ever since the discovery of extra-terrestrial communication that ended up being radio waves from the microwave in the lab kitchen.