Scientists bent frickin’ laser beams to create this detailed image of a cat

Every cat owner knows how their pet likes to chase a small beam of light from a laser. Physicists in Brazil have figured out how to bend laser light into intricate shapes to create a realistic image of a cat. Their method could be useful for building better optical traps to create clouds of ultra-cold atoms for a variety of quantum experiments.

The ability to produce and precisely control the shape of laser beams with high fidelity is important for many segments of research and industry. Most wavefront engineering approaches are grouped into two categories.

Digital micro mirrors and acoustic optical modulators are easy to implement and boast a fast response for feedback control. They can't control the phase of the light field and can't make structured light. They are prone to distort.

Various phase-controlled methods can be used to create phase-structured light and beam. Slower control speeds and a lack of feedback are tradeoffs. They wanted to come up with a phase controlled approach that implemented some of the desirable features of DMDs and AOMs.

They improved on an earlier method to get better results. To match the orientation of a liquid crystal, they used a laser. They could organize the crystals with the help of the field. Silva and Muniz were able to make several arbitrary shapes with the help of the modulator.

Experiments show that simple and flat shapes can be created using the method described, as well as complex and feature-rich images. Their method could be used to shape beams from high-powered lasers.

Useful applications include optical patterning and lithography, as well as optical trapping of ultra cold atoms, which are ideal for simulating quantum effects. Scientists can study the strange, small world of quantum physics as if they were looking at it through a magnifying glass with the help of a BEC. Physicists have been able to tiequantum knots in BECs and make movies of how the knots decay, or "untie" themselves, fairly soon after forming.

These are fragile quantum systems and need to be manipulated. Any imperfections in the optical trap would knock the atoms out of their quantum state.

It's sort of a proxy to show that you can do very fine and precise features, but I don't have any good ideas of things you could do with ultra-cold atoms. We can make nice looking images of cats, but we can also use this system to do quantum simulations of electrons and superconductivity.

ArXiv is published in the year 2022. About DOIs can be found in 10.48550/arXiv. 2204.

There is a listing image by P.F. Silva.