A hidden property of corkscrew, spiraled beams of light could put a hitch in quantum mechanics.

The photons, or light particles, inside these light-based Möbius strips spin with a momentum previously thought to be impossible. The findings could shake up some of the assumptions in quantum mechanics, the rules that govern the menagerie of tiny subatomic particles.

"This is a sort of fairly basic property of light, and we've shown it's not working the way people thought it would," said study co-author Paul Eastham, a physicist at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

Hollow beams of light

The research was spurred by findings from roughly two centuries ago, when Irish physicist and astronomer William Hamilton and his colleague Humphrey Lloyd predicted that crystals with certain internal arrangements of their atoms would create a hollow tube of light if the incident light hit the crystal at just the right angle.

In honor of the 200th anniversary of this discovery, Eastham and his colleagues decided to probe the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon. He began to wonder what this type of hollow light beam implied for the angular momentum, or spin, of light particles that made up the ray. As he worked through the math, he realized something strange: The photons inside the conical ray would have an angular momentum of one-half of Planck's constant, the fundamental constant that governs the relationship between energy and wavelength.

But that seemed impossible, given that the equations of quantum mechanics implied that light particles could have spins that were multiples of the fundamental constant (for instance, twice Planck's constant, negative three times Planck's constant, and so on).

Half-spin photons

To see if his calculations would be borne out in reality, the team tested the theory. They sent a laser beam through a crystal at a precise angle, and then used a mainstay optical device called an interferometer to split the beams of light and sort them according to their spin.

Sure enough, the photons, when measured, had angular momentums equal to one-half Planck's constant and minus one-half Planck's constant, respectively, the researchers reported online April 29 in the journal Science Advances.

The findings are fascinating because they imply that light particles don't behave as they're predicted to, said study co-author Kyle Ballantine, a physicist at Trinity College Dublin.

"All particles can be divided into two fundamental groups: Bosons, including photons in all measurements to date, have integer [whole number] angular momentum; and fermions [such as electrons] have half-integer," Ballantine told Live Science in an email. "This distinction leads to very different quantum behavior. Our result shows that we can make beams of photons which behave like fermions, a completely different form of matter."

Still, the new results don't reduce the significance of Planck's constant or tear down the entire edifice of subatomic physics, Eastham said.

"We haven't broken quantum mechanics," Eastham told Live Science.

However, the results are still so new that it's not clear exactly what they suggest, Eastham said. One immediate implication: The findings could affect quantum computing and cryptography, both of which would rely on statistics regarding subatomic particles that may need to be rethought, he said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Billions Of Miles Away From Earth, New Horizons Spots A Wandering Object

https://youtu.be/WwRvWMRUhKE

As NASA's New Horizons probe speeds toward a possible encounter with an object beyond the orbit of Pluto, the spacecraft has made observations of another icy object located in the same outer region of the solar system.

New Horizons finished its close encounter with Pluto last July and since then has completed two sets of observations on an object in the Kuiper Belt, the band of objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. The icy body is known as 1994 JR1 and orbits about 32 astronomical units away from the sun (an astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun). New Horizons' view of the faint, icy body can be seen inthis video from Space.com.

The observations put a stop to the hypothesis that JR1 may be a satellite of Pluto, New Horizons science team member Simon Porter said in a statement from NASA. [See More Pluto Photos by NASA's New Horizons]

 "Combining the November 2015 and April 2016 observations allows us to pinpoint the location of JR1 to within 1,000 kilometers (about 600 miles), far better than any small [Kuiper Belt object]," said Porter, a postdoctoral planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado.

The team also figured out how fast the 90-mile-wide (150 km) object is rotating, using observations taken in April. Changes in light reflected off of JR1's surface showed that the object rotates once every 5.4 hours, which is considered relatively quick for a KBO.

These observations will serve as practice for the possible 20 other objects New Horizons can see in the Kuiper Belt through its extended mission. If the New Horizons extended mission receives approval from NASA, the probe will do close-up observations of 2014 MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019.

New atmospheric insights

Meanwhile, researchers continue to analyze data from last year's Pluto encounter. Team members now have new insights into the dwarf planet's tenuous atmosphere after looking at starlight passing through the wispy gas, according to the NASA statement.

Roughly four hours after New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto, on July 14, the spacecraft's ultraviolet spectrometer instrument looked at two stars moving behind Pluto and its atmosphere (astronomers call this a stellar occultation).

"The light from each star dimmed as it moved through deeper layers of Pluto’s atmosphere, absorbed by various gases and hazes," NASA wrote in a second press release.

The spectrometer confirmed previous measurements from New Horizons showing that Pluto's upper atmosphere is up to 25 percent colder (and thus more compact) than what scientists expected before New Horizons flew by. The instrument also confirmed a calculation that nitrogen molecules escape the dwarf planet's atmosphere at a rate of about 1,000 times lower than expected.

Stellar occultations of 1994 JR1 were also performed using light from the sun. This allowed New Horizons to confirm the atmospheric temperature and structure, measure the escape rate of nitrogen molecules from the atmosphere, and detect the presence of various gases (including nitrogen, methane and acetylene).

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace

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Original article on Sace.com.