I was not aware about it, but as a particle physicist my first reaction is - great, it will be (maybe) possible to construct a photon storage ring to study, in a clean way, photon-photon interactions ? Actually such photons following a circular path can be forseen to exist only in the vicinity of a black hole.

Http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.0300v2.pdf

Berry indeed. Geometrical phase permits in (3+1)D any bending that preserves wave-packets:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1134/1.1348476

See publications by Wegener: Institut für Angewandte Physik KIT

http://www.aph.kit.edu/wegener/77.php

http://www.cfn.kit.edu/223_1237.php

This had a big influence in the development of the invisible cloak

It never ceases to amaze me how our latest discovers were guessed years ago. My favorite one is the Greek gentleman that mentioned atoms about 2 - 3 thousand years ago.

If the statement is actually true, then there has to be applications in communications and information storage. I am still trying to figure out how.

I was not aware about it, but as a particle physicist my first reaction is - great, it will be (maybe) possible to construct a photon storage ring to study, in a clean way, photon-photon interactions ? Actually such photons following a circular path can be forseen to exist only in the vicinity of a black hole.

Very interesting, but I do not have any idea of possible applications

Beautiful results derived from the fundamental theory of waves, and numerical methods to solve wave equations. This shows that there are still tricks and surprises left at the intersection between applied mathematics and wave packets/wave propagation theory. I don't see *ANY* applications here related to invisibility/concealment -- the effect described in the paper would only work if you prepared special wave-packets or beams with highly specialized distribution/properties, so it is irrelevant to evading "ordinary" waves/beams like ordinary sunlight, ordinary radar, ordinary sonar, etc. However, there are probably lots of applications for *detection* --consider any application where you wish you could "see around the corner" so to speak-- a curving wave-packet or wave-beam might find an application there. I am imagining applications not only in communications, but also in medical devices and, (unfortunately?), military/weapons applications. One of the articles on this subject points out that this result was solved for the Maxwell wave equations, but similar results might hold for other wave equations including, for example, acoustic wave propagation in fluids and solids, or plasma wave propagation. That might yield new tricks in sonar (underwater detection, not invisibility) and in plasma soliton propagation for directed-energy weapons in air. And for example in the use of guiding acoustic waves or radio/microwaves to a target inside the body for medical applications. There might be a geophysical application somewhere, but only where the media (air, water?) are uniform enough-- it would not work in the non-uniform media of sold earth for example, because the carefully-crafted wave-packets or wave-beams would break up due to the irregularities of mineral formations.

would be interesting if there were. so would have a new view of physics. I liked the idea.

and point of view of quantum optics would like this new vision.

Otim Odong:"If the statement is actually true, then there has to be applications in communications and information storage. I am still trying to figure out how."

Photon storage rings might be a required part of FTL (optical) transmission.

You send the photon schroedinger cats, and store them in the photon storage ring, until you need that particular packet, then let them out again. As long as storage and retrieval does not result in wave-packet collapse you can synchronize the packets between transmitter and receiver.

Could a photon storage ring be constructed to store energy with (practically) zero losses?

In my opinion the light is the future of humanity

More references:

Controlling Quantum Tunneling With Light: Novel Particle Opens Door to Taming Mysteries of Tunneling

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120405142156.htm

New Way of Lasing: A 'Superradiant' Laser Science News

and related stories

p://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120404133654.htm

Quantum computation using impurities of a diamond; Research

Read more: http://saypeople.com/2012/04/07/quantum-computation-using-impurities-of-a-diamond-research/#ixzz1sdLqCOd5

http://saypeople.com/2012/04/07/quantum-computation-using-impurities-of-a-diamond-research/#axzz1sdLY3aGM

Real-time single-molecule imaging of quantum interference

Thomas Juffmann, Adriana Milic, Michael Müllneritsch, Peter Asenbaum, Alexander Tsukernik, Jens Tüxen, Marcel Mayor, Ori Cheshnovsky, Markus Arndt

Nature Nanotechnology

Vol.: Published online

DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2012.34

When diffraction occurs, waves (including light) bend around an obstacle. It was known earlier.

All new is well forgotten old.

Instead of reply I ad a question: What is the "structure" (longitudinal and transverse) of a coherent laser beam?

I think u can make small objects invisible

@Petrus. Coherent laser light is just an electromagnetic field with a single wavelength (ideally). Its polarization depends on the technical setup of the laser; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser.

@Sergey (Sergej?). You should properly appreciate the fact that diffraction is *not* involved here.

Microscopes and Telescopes more powerful. Certainly!!!

@Petrus-- actual lasers that you can use and measure, for example in an optics laboratory, obviously cannot have a "single wavelength" in the perfect sense. Consider for example the classic red Helium-Neon or "HeNe" laser, which was for two decades the most common "workhorse" laser for optics experiments (now replaced by diode lasers for most laboratory applications however):

A well-designed HeNe that might have cost several hundred dollars in 1990 would usually operate "Continuous Wave" and produce a red (632 nm wavelength) beam that was about 1 or 2 mm in diameter at the point where the beam was emitted from the output optical coupler of the laser cavity. While the laser was "continuous wave" and therefore theoretically could have almost infinitely narrow spectrum (Fourier Transform property: the shorter the pulse, the broader the spectrum or the longer the wavetrain, the narrower the possible spectrum.) In practice however, even the more expensive HeNe lasers tended to jump around in phase every millisecond or so, because the optical cavity can support multiple nearby coherent modes of such a small wavelength, and the temperature of the laser is continually drifting as the lab temperature drifts. Mechanical vibrations (even sound) also can result in tiny changes in the HeNe laser optical cavity that result in mode-jumps or mode-hops. As a result of this "phase noise," the real spectrum of the HeNe laser would be finite and the spectral width would be measurable if you had an extremely expensive spectroscopy instrument with sufficient resolution.

So, longitudinally, a typicaly CW (continuous wave) laser looks like a continuous sinusoidal function with occasional jumps in phase the laser goes through mode-hops. All lasers do this to some extent. A pulsed laser beam looks the same way except instead of a continuous sinusoidal function, the sinusoidal oscillation starts at low amplitude at the beginning of the pulse, then ramps up to a peak value, then ramps back down again. Ultra-short pulses (such as Q-switched mode-locked Titanium-sapphire femtosecond lasers that have been compressed by a diffractive element) tend to be almost Gaussian in time (ramping up to the peak and then back down again according to the "normal" or Gaussian distribution) for reasons that relate to the physical mechanism used to compress pulses to ultra-short duration.

Transverse profile: a well-shaped laser beam with minimal diffraction should also be "Gaussian," in the sense that the electric/magnetic field amplitudes within the beam ramp up from near zero at the edges to a peak value in the middle of the beam and then ramp back down again toward the other edge. It can be shown (for example, see Siegman's textbook, "Lasers" http://www.amazon.com/Lasers-Anthony-E-Siegman/dp/0935702113) that a coherent light beam that has this Gaussian transverse profile as the minimal amount of self-diffraction as it propagates through vacuum (or in the case of air, near-vacuum for practical purposes in the visible light range). However, not all lasers produce such happily Guassian beam profiles, particularly in the early prototype stages of development. In the years 2001-2003 I worked on some novel types of laser systems using Silicon Optical Amplifiers (SOA) and there were times when our experimental laser prototypes produced horribly ugly, non-Gaussian, not even round, laser beams that diffracted badly and were difficult to work with. The goal in most laser designs is to try to produce a laser with the Gaussian beam profile. However as the authors of this recent paper have shown, there are some very unusual cases where you would WANT a highly non-Guassian beam profile: where the very non-Gaussian beam profile would cause the beam to "bend without diffraction" due simply to the unusual wave mechanics of such a peculiar beam profile. I don't think the article goes on to explain how you would actually produce such a beam...?