University of St Andrews

Since (at least) a quarter of a century researchers are fascinated by twisted light, i.e. light that carries orbital angular momentum. I am one of them!  

At Glasgow we routinely use a variety of techniques to imprint structure in the spatial amplitude, phase and polarisation of a light beam.  In my team we specialise on the interaction of structured light with (rubidium) atoms: from cold ones at tens of Microkelvin to atomic gasses at room temperature and above.  I will talk about three of our experiments: (1) how to imprint and read-out 3D structures into a room temperature rubidium vapour, (2) the conversion of twisted light from the near infrared to blue based on four wave mixing in a warm vapour cell and (3) imprinting of optical phase and polarisation information into ground state coherences of cold atoms.