Imagine a green beam that, passing through an ingenious optical setup, twists into a three-dimensional funnel of light — an optical vortex. At its heart, like in the eye of a hurricane, the intensity drops to zero. It is there that photons disappear. But a few millimeters later they resurrect — energy is not lost, and this brief leap into the unknown is exactly described by transformation into an axion and back. This is predicted within the Standard Model and its extensions.

The whirlpool metaphor becomes tangible: photons, like leaves in a whirlpool, momentarily dive into an invisible axion layer of reality and return, preserving total momentum. This is not a redistribution of light, but the creation of new particles, requiring a quantum field with a special symmetry. The axion idea, proposed by Helen Quinn and Frank Wilczek to explain CP conservation in strong interactions, is today becoming the cornerstone of the hunt for dark matter. In this quest, we resemble 19th-century physicists who searched for the ether — only now, instead of an elastic medium, we have an axion field permeating the cosmos.

The method relies on an interference pattern that reconstructs a three-dimensional portrait of the field in the tradition of quantum optics: interferometry captures how the superposition of a central beam and a ring creates a singularity — a funnel where photons can tunnel into the axion state. Reproducibility across different detectors and powers sweeps away artifacts, making the axion hypothesis almost inevitable.

In the future, such tabletop “whirlpools” will become compact axion sources, complementing astrophysical observations of gravitational lensing and studies of the expansion of the universe. By increasing power and integrating superconducting converters, we can not only confirm the existence of dark matter but also move closer to understanding dark energy, and perhaps — recreate conditions on the lab bench akin to the Big Bang.