Topological Expansion of Boehm's Brushes via Structured Light
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We report an entoptic phenomenon in which the classical two-lobed Boehm’s brushes are transformed into a multilobed structure by projecting spin–orbit-coupled light onto the human retina. These structured beams, composed of nonseparable superpositions of circular polarization and orbital angular momentum, produce azimuthally modulated entoptic patterns through polarization-dependent scattering in the retina. Unlike Haidinger’s brushes, which arise from dichroic absorption in the macula, the observed effect is driven by angular variations in scattering strength relative to the local polarization direction. In regions where scattering centers exhibit polarization orientations that converge toward a common point, their combined contributions reinforce one another, producing brighter and more sharply defined entoptic lobes whose number and orientation vary systematically with the topology of the spin–orbit stimulus. Psychophysical measurements across retinal eccentricities from 0.5 ° to 4 ° in eleven participants revealed that contrast detection thresholds decreased exponentially with eccentricity, consistent with polarization-sensitive scattering by isotropic structures in the nonfoveal retinal regions. From the psychophysical fits, the mean eccentricity at which the entoptic pattern reached a 50% threshold was <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>r</mml:mi> <mml:mn>50</mml:mn> </mml:msub> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> <mml:mo>.</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>03</mml:mn> <mml:mo>°</mml:mo> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> with a 95% CI of [0.72, 1.34] ° , indicating that the spin–orbit-induced entoptic structure becomes perceptually robust at approximately 1 ° retinal eccentricity and that perception improves with increasing retinal eccentricity. Together, these findings demonstrate that spin–orbit light modulates scattering-based visual phenomena in previously unrecognized ways, enabling approaches for probing retinal structure and visual processing using topological features of light.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".