A football kicked with spin doesn't fly straight: it bends to the side. A tightly focused beam of light does something similar: it starts pushing an atom not just forward but also sideways. Physicists measured this shift on a single calcium ion trapped in a light trap.
The beam was aimed at the atom like a spotlight on a grain of sand. It turned out that the strongest interaction doesn't occur exactly at the center of the light spot but is offset by several hundred nanometers — a thousand times thinner than a human hair. The reason is that inside a focused beam, the light is slightly "twisted," and this twist affects the atom differently depending on its internal state.
Such tiny nudges accumulate. If you hold an atom in an optical tweezer, a trap made of light, the sideways pressure can throw off the precision of quantum operations. Understanding this effect helps build more reliable quantum devices where each atom must stay in its place.
The Magnus effect, which usually describes the flight of a spinning ball, also works for light: a twisted beam pushes an atom sideways, just as a curveball bends around a wall of players.
In "Star Trek," a tractor beam grabs ships, but there the light isn't twisted — here, the twist is exactly what produces the sideways shift.