The University of Glasgow, founded by papal bull in 1451, is a public research university in Glasgow, Scotland, and the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world. A prominent institution of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is renowned for its comprehensive academic offerings and influential alums, who have made significant contributions to various professions, including science and engineering. NECLA collaborated with the University of Glasgow on techniques to exploit unlabeled vision-and-language data using pretrained multimodal models. We research enhanced AI’s ability to perform complex tasks, such as image captioning and visual question answering, with minimal supervision, thereby advancing scalable learning systems.

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Optical orbital angular momentum analogy to the Stern-Gerlach experiment

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Symmetry breaking has been shown to reveal interesting phenomena in physical systems. A notable example is the fundamental work of Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach [Stern and Zerlach, Z. Physik 9, 349 (1922)] nearly 100 years ago demonstrating a spin angular momentum (SAM) deflection that differed from classical theory. Here we use non-separable states of SAM and orbital angular momentum (OAM), known as vector vortex modes, to demonstrate how a classical optics analogy can be used to reveal this nonseparability, reminiscent of the work carried out by Sternand Gerlach. We show that by implementing a polarization insensitive device to measure the OAM, the SAM states can be deflected to spatially resolved positions.

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