An Archimedean screw made of light

Over the past years, the flexible generation of novel laser intensity profiles has been a major topic in optical research [1, 2]. One important class of those new profiles are spatially rotating or spiralling beams [3, 4, 5]. They find use in material processing, optical micro-manipulation and remote sensing. In order to obtain the desired behavior, interfering Bessel beams of different order can be employed. Here, we will present theory on spiralling intensity profiles, propose a flexible, experimental way to achieve them, and for the first time demonstrate that such beams can be manipulated even temporally.