York researchers create ‘tornados’ inside electron microscopes

Researchers from the University of York are pioneering the development of electron microscopes which will allow scientists to examine a greater variety of materials in new revolutionary ways. 

Time-division multiplexing of the orbital angular momentum of light

Time-division multiplexing of the orbital angular momentum of light Ebrahim Karimi, Lorenzo Marrucci, Corrado de Lisio, and Enrico Santamato

Optics Letters, Vol. 37, Issue 2, pp. 127-129 (2012)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OL.37.000127Abstract

We present an optical setup for generating a sequence of light pulses in which the orbital angular momentum (OAM) degree of freedom is correlated with the temporal one. The setup is based on a single q plate within a ring optical resonator. By this approach, we demonstrate the generation of a train of pulses carrying increasing values of OAM, or, alternatively, of a controlled temporal sequence of pulses having prescribed OAM superposition states. Finally, we exhibit an “OAM-to-time conversion” apparatus that divides different input OAM states into different time bins. The latter application provides a simple approach to digital spiral spectroscopy of pulsed light.

http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ol/abstract.cfm?URI=ol-37-2-127

Twisting Radio Waves Could Give Us 100x More Wireless Bandwidth

As more people stream video to their mobile devices, wireless bandwidth is becoming an increasingly precious commodity. Data traffic increased 8,000 percent in the past four years on AT&T’s network alone

DARPA Funds Optical Vortices Research

DARPA Funds Optical Vortices Research by Prof. Ramachandran and MIT Lincoln Lab

Vorticity Transmission Could Increase Spectrum Efficiency

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LDPC-Coded Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) Modulation For Free-Space Optical Communication

An Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) based LDPC-coded modulation scheme suitable for use in FSO communication is proposed. They demonstrate that the proposed scheme can operate under strong atmospheric turbulence regime and enable 100 Gb/s optical transmission while employing 10 Gb/s components.

A hot new technology to keep your eye on - RF orbital angular momentum

[I have been fascinated by the theory of Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) since I first read about it in the mid 1990s in a UK science publication. I believe that OAM may have some unique applications in RF signaling especially for new multi-spectral coding techniques and medical diagnostic and imaging applications.