Andrew Forbes

School of Physics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa

Andrew has at various times in his career found himself as teacher, janitor, secretary, receptionist, web-master, systems engineer, sales rep, manager, director, and sometimes a scientist. Andrew is presently a Distinguished Professor within the School of Physics at the U. Witwatersrand (South Africa) where leads a laboratory for Structured Light. Andrew is active in promoting photonics in Africa, a founding member of the Photonics Initiative of South Africa and Director of South Africa’s Quantum Technology Initiative. He is a Fellow of SPIE, Optica, the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP), PIERS, an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and Editor in Chief of APL Photonics. Andrew has won several awards, including the NSTF national award for his contributions to photonics in South Africa (2015), the Georg Forster prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for outstanding contributions to photonics (2020), the SAIP Gold Medal (2020), the highest award for physics in South Africa, making him the youngest winner to date, the Sang Soo Lee award (2022) from Optica and the Korean Optical Society and the TWAS Prize for Physics (2024). Andrew spends his time having fun with the taxpayers’ money, exploring structured light in lasers as well as classical and quantum optics.

Weaving topologies into light

In the early 1960s, inspired by developing notions of topological structure, Tony Skyrme suggested that sub-atomic particles be described as natural excitations of a single quantum field. Although never adopted for its intended purpose, the notion of a skyrmion as a topologically stable field configuration has proven highly versatile, finding application in condensed matter physics, acoustics and more recently optics. A recent trend in structured light is to imbue optical fields with such a topology, promising a topological alphabet that is robust to noise. Using examples from classical and quantum optics, I will highlight the recent progress made in this field and the exciting future prospects. In particular, I will outline the deep connection between entanglement and topology, and how this may be harnessed for the digitization of quantum information.