Physicists create laser tornado in miniature structures using synthetic magnetic field

Can light behave like a whirlwind? It turns out that it is possible – and such “optical tornadoes” have now been created in an extremely small structure by scientists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology and the Institut Pascal CNRS at the Université Clermont Auvergne. This discovery opens a new avenue for creating miniature light sources with complex structures, potentially enabling the development of simpler and more scalable photonic devices in the future, for applications such as optical communication and quantum technologies. The research is published in the journal Science Advances.