Optical vortices: Optical manipulation to crystal dislocations

Optical vortices are an interesting phenomenon, showing analogous behaviour to other vortices and screw dislocations found in physics and having many applications. We review here some of our work on optical vortices; covering their production, their use in manipulating low-refractive index micro-particles, the effects seen because of the orbital angular momentum contained within such beams and interfering optical vortices with associated applications. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.