Physicists Come Up With Most Neglected Properties of Light

A team of researchers working at the University of Toronto recently showcased a completely new way to enhance the telescopes and microscopes resolution that is way beyond the present conventions by looking into the priorly neglected light properties. The method offers observers to differentiate between very distant and small objects that are so fused into each other that seem blur and singular in one look. Microscopes and telescopes happen to be one of the greatest medium for observing lonely subjects. Scientists were able to measure and detect a single distantly located star with high precision. However, other things like thee binary stars never work in this manner.

The reason being, the best-in-class telescopes abide by the laws of physics that allow light to spread out or diffract. A very sharp pin-point becomes completely burred dot. In case, two stars are very close to each other and overlap, you cannot separate them, however, precise your observation is. The valuable information is lost then and there. It was almost a century back when Sir Rayleigh formulated the law that a minimum distance was needed for objects to be picked out singularly by a telescope. Telescopes only respond to the “intensity” of light or brightness. However, it is getting clearer and clearer to man that there are a few properties of light that work beyond Rayleigh’s Criterion.

Physicists harness neglected properties of light

Professor Aephraim Steinberg, a senior fellow in the Quantum Information and a physicist at the U of T’s Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control, adds that, “o beat Rayleigh’s curse, you have to do something clever.” Some of these ideas have already been acknowledged but they depend on just intensity. Steinberg likes to add that, “We measured another property of light called ‘phase.’ And phase gives you just as much information about sources that are very close together as it does those with large separations.”

Light travels in forms of waves and all waves have phases. Even when two objects are too close and their lights sources blur and form a single blob. Steinberg explains that, “We tried to come up with the simplest thing you could possibly do, to play with the phase, you have to slow a wave down, and light is actually easy to slow down.” They splitted the images into half, .light from each half went through the glass of varying thickness that slows down the speed of waves when they take different amount of time to pass through different things. This alters their respective phases and when the beams recombine they form a very distinct interference pattern that showed researchers if the original image had one object or two