For the past few years, researchers have essentially been doing this with light. By overlapping several laser beams with specific properties and directing them through a series of lenses, interference ...

The remarkable feat of tying light in knots has been achieved by a team of physicists working at the universities of Bristol, Glasgow and Southampton, UK, reports a paper in Nature Physics this week.

Scientists have demonstrated a sort of holographic strip that splits a single laser beam into five bespoke beams that create an optical knot. The work shows that optical knots could be used as a ...