Modern beam shaping techniques have enabled the generation of optical fields displaying a wealth of structural features, which include three-dimensional topologies such as Möbius, ribbon strips and knots. However, unlike simpler types of structured light, the topological properties of these optical fields have hitherto remained more of a fundamental curiosity as opposed to a feature that can be applied in modern technologies. Due to their robustness against external perturbations, topological invariants in physical systems are increasingly being considered as a means to encode information. Hence, structured light with topological properties could potentially be used for such purposes. Here, we introduce the experimental realization of structures known as framed knots within optical polarization fields. We further develop a protocol in which the topological properties of framed knots are used in conjunction with prime factorization to encode information.
We realize a robust and compact cylindrical vector beam generator which consists of a simple two-element interferometer composed of a beam displacer and a cube beamsplitter. The interferometer operates on the higherorder Poincaré sphere transforming a homogeneously polarized vortex into a cylindrical vector (CV) beam. We experimentally demonstrate the transformation of a single vortex beam into all the well-known CV beams and show the operations on the higher-order Poincaré sphere according to the control parameters. Our method offers an alternative to the Pancharatnam-Berry phase optical elements and has the potential to be implemented as a monolithic device. 1 arXiv:1908.07562v1 [physics.optics]
We introduce a novel and simple modulation technique to tailor optical beams with a customized amount of orbital angular momentum (OAM). The technique is based on the modulation of the angular spectrum of a seed beam, which allows us to specify in an independent manner the value of OAM and the shape of the resulting beam transverse intensity. We experimentally demonstrate our method by arbitrarily shaping the radial and angular intensity distributions of Bessel and Laguerre-Gauss beams, while their OAM 1 arXiv:1906.08984v1 [physics.optics]
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