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Research around mechanical properties of the electromagnetic field has led to exquisite control over material systems and caused a strong impact over countless fundamental and interdisciplinary studies. While modern day applications, e.g. optical tweezers, are based on the transfer of linear momentum between light and matter, it is also possible to transfer other quantities such as angular momentum. Angular momentum is conserved for free electromagnetic fields and, for certain field distributions, can be separated into two components:spin, associated to its polarization, and orbital, associated to its phase. When the separation is possible, both the local field distribution and the nature of the material particles it interacts with play a central role in the associated rotational dynamics [1]. In this lecture I will review several properties of the angular momentum for electromagnetic fields. Starting from issues that can rise from the separation into orbital and spin components, before moving towards paradigmatic examples of electromagnetic fields displaying angular momentum and novel experiments regarding the exchange of angular momentum between light and matter

References

- M. E. J. Friese, T. A. Nieminen, N. R. Heckenberg and H. Rubinsztein-Dunlop, Nature 394,348-350 (1998)
- R. Jauregui, Phys. Rev. A 70, 033415 (2004), C. T. Schmiegelow, J. Schulz, H. Kaufmann,T. Ruster, U. G. Poschinger and F. Schmidt-Kaler, Nature Comm. 7, 12998 (2016)