How to twist light into a Möbius strip

Möbius strips can easily be made at home – just take a strip of paper, give it a half-twist and then join its ends together. Trivial as it may sound, this loop possesses the unusual property of having only one surface and one edge. They also appear very rarely in nature and had never before been seen in light. Now, an international group of physicists has created such shapes using the polarization of laser light, and the researchers say that these electromagnetic patterns could be used to build new kinds of small-scale structure such as metamaterials.