PHOTONIC FRONTIERS: OPTICAL SINGULARITIES - Optical singularities range from black holes to laser speckle and rainbows

摘要

Optical singularities are all around us, hiding in plain sight in the dark zones of laser speckles and the hollow cores of annular laser beams. Understanding them may lead to new applications in many fields. In mathematics, a singularity occurs when some quantity is not definable, not differentiable, or otherwise behaving badly. For example, a graph of y=1/x has a singularity at x=0 because dividing by zero yields an infinite result. The best-known physical singularity is the center of a non-rotating black hole, where theory predicts that the curvature of space becomes infinite.