A team from the University of Rochester has shown that fluctuations in "twisted light" could be exploited for a range of applications, from detecting rotating black holes to object detection by lidar, the light-equivalent of radar.
In a paper, published in Science Advances today, the researchers demonstrate that for light from a source such as the Sun, random fluctuations of intensity give rise to correlations of twisted light beams. They showed the presence of these correlations by modifying a now classical experiment called Hanbury Brown - Twiss (HBT) interferometry to focus on the angular information contained in light, the "twist" in the light.
The team, from Robert W. Boyd's group at Rochester's Institute of Optics, suggest that these correlations could allow for sunlight (or a similar type of light) to be used for some remote sensing and object detection applications that until now were thought to require lasers and entangled photons.
This is a Holy Grail of remote sensing. To read more, click here.