Helices of light: dark helices with a bright future
Laser beams can be made to form dark as well as bright intensity helices, or corkscrews of light. In a paper shortly to appear in Optics Express, Dr Ole Steuernagel, at the University of Hertfordshire's Science and Technology Research Institute, has now shown that forming dark helices can have considerable advantages over employing their commonly considered bright cousins.Light helices may have many fundamental and technological applications in lithography and the manipulation of particles through optical forces, such as particle trapping and particle transport. In lithography, the light
