Physicists create 'laser tornado' with liquid crystals
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- University of Warsaw physicists, with the Military University of Technology and Université Clermont Auvergne, created "optical tornadoes" — light waves that twist around their axis with spiraling phase and rotating polarization — published in Science Advances (2026).
- Liquid crystal torons — twisted spiral structures closed into doughnut-like rings — served as microscopic light traps, replacing the complex nanostructures typically required to generate such optical vortices.
- Spatially variable birefringence in the liquid crystal acts as a "synthetic magnetic field" for photons, bending light like electrons in cyclotron orbits, per Dr. Piotr Kapuściński.
- The system achieved orbital angular momentum lasing in the ground state for the first time — the most stable, lowest-energy state — making lasing easier because light naturally selects this state with the lowest losses, per Prof. Jacek Szczytko.
- An optical microcavity amplified the field, and adding laser dye produced coherent laser light with well-defined energy and emission direction, verifying the vortex lasing.
- Prof. Dmitry Solnyshkov noted the approach draws on "vectorial charge" theories, making photons behave "not even like electrons, but like quarks."
Why it matters: Self-organizing liquid crystals may replace the complex nanofabrication normally required for structured-light sources, offering a simpler, voltage-tunable, potentially scalable route to photonic devices for optical communication and quantum technologies. The ground-state OAM lasing is the key unlock: a stable, low-loss mode engineers can actually build devices around, not an excited-state curiosity.
