The article by Jacopo De Ponti, research fellow at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, in collaboration with colleagues from Imperial College London, was selected for a “focus article” in the prestigious Physical Review Letters magazine.
Read the full article here: Physics – Waves in a Solid Imitate Twisted Light (aps.org)
Here is a brief excerpt from the research:
Taking inspiration from light beams with helical wavefronts, researchers have recently generated twisting waves of vibration moving through a solid material. Now the team has shown theoretically that a component of these waves has the same kind of angular momentum as twisting optical waves [1]. The team has also found that such twisting waves moving through the walls of a pipe can controllably excite similarly twisting pressure waves in a fluid. This effect could be used to monitor the properties of fluids or to detect cracks in pipes.