Optical metasurfaces for generating and manipulating optical vortex beams

Abstract

Optical vortices (OVs) carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) have attracted considerable interest in the field of optics and photonics owing to their peculiar optical features and extra degree of freedom for carrying information. Although there have been significant efforts to realize OVs using conventional optics, it is limited by large volume, high cost, and lack of design flexibility. Optical metasurfaces have recently attracted tremendous interest due to their unprecedented capability in the manipulation of the amplitude, phase, polarization, and frequency of light at a subwavelength scale. Optical metasurfaces have revolutionized design concepts in photonics, providing a new platform to develop ultrathin optical devices for the realization of OVs at subwavelength resolution. In this article, we will review the recent progress in optical metasurface-based OVs. We provide a comprehensive discussion on the optical manipulation of OVs, including OAM superposition, OAM sorting, OAM multiplexing, OAM holography, and nonlinear metasurfaces for OAM generation and manipulation. The rapid development of metasurface for OVs generation and manipulation will play an important role in many relevant research fields. We expect that metasurface will fuel the continuous progress of wearable and portable consumer electronics and optics where low-cost and miniaturized OAM related systems are in high demand.

Recent Advances in Tunable Metasurfaces: Materials, Design, and Applications

“…Photonic spin–orbit interactions have recently attracted much attention due to their similarity with the spin–orbit interaction of electrons in solids . PCM metasurfaces offer a rich degree of freedom to dynamically manipulate the spin and orbital angular momenta of light. , The Pancharatanam-Berry (PB) phase and propagation phase of GST nanofins were utilized to realize the conversion from spin angular momentum (SAM) to orbital angular momentum (OAM) . The PB phase remained unchanged across different phase states, while the propagation phase varied accordingly.…”

Arbitrary-Order and Multichannel Optical Vortices with Simultaneous Amplitude and Phase Modulation on Plasmonic Metasurfaces

“…Meanwhile, the beam size and divergence angle of the bi-channel vortex beams can be calculated directly. Because the vortex beam with orbital angular momentum has spatial orthogonality, the designed wavelength and polarization multiplexing metasurfaces expand the research scope of subsurface compact multifunctional photonics and may have a wide range of applications in information security and anticounterfeiting [42]…”

Basis function approach for diffractive pattern generation with Dammann vortex metasurfaces

“…Such phase can be easily encoded into the orientations of meta-atoms, which can ease the design process. Various applications based on metasurfaces have been proposed and demonstrated, such as holography (23,25,26), vectorial optics (27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33), structural beam generation (34)(35)(36), beam shaping (37), and optical information multiplexing (12,38,39). For example, metasurface has been demonstrated for generating vortex arrays with donut intensity profiles (40).…”