Laser helps turn an electron into a coil of mass and charge
A special laser (red) can spiralise electrons (blue)Dr. Yiqi Fang, University of Konstanz
An electron has been turned into a spiralling wave of mass and charge, with the help of a laser.
“Chirality, or handedness, is an interesting and still in part enigmatic feature of our universe,” says Peter Baum at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Chiral objects, like coils or L-shaped blocks, come in either left or right-handed forms; non-chiral ones, like circles or straight lines, do not. Many molecules and materials are naturally chiral, and whether they are right or left-handed changes how they function. But Baum and his colleagues devised a way to add chirality to something very small and elementary – a single electron.
Electrons are quantum objects, so they exhib...
