COLLEGE PARK, Md., May 19, 2021 — Researchers at the University of Maryland have shown that photons in a vacuum can have orbital angular momentum (OAM) vectors that point sideways, at 90° to the direction of propagation. The discovery relies on a spatiotemporal optical vortex (STOV), the pulses of which are already known to hold potential in nonlinear optics applications. There are two types of rotational momentum in physics: spin and orbital. Both are described by the quantity known as angular momentum (AM). 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