Vortex beams of atoms and molecules

Abstract

Vortex beams of nonelementary particles The discovery of photon and electron vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum (as a result of a twisting wave front) has led to appreciable advances in optical imaging, optical and electron microscopy, communications, quantum optics and micromanipulation, and more advances are expected. In an effort to extend this progress to other types of beams, Luski et al . demonstrate the production of vortex beams of helium atoms and dimers formed from supersonic beams with large coherence lengths diffracted off of specifically nanofabricated gratings with fork dislocations (see the Perspective by Kornilov). Vortex beams made of nonelementary particles with internal degrees of freedom represent a direct manifestation of quantum mechanics on macroscopic scale, and their production paves the way for many long-awaited applications. —YS

Optical manipulation of matter waves

“…( 7)], thus permitting us to directly imprint an on-demand lateral wave function and prepare, for example, states with a desired degree of orbital angular momentum [27,30] (Fig. 4b) by optical interactions instead of mask patterning [72], as well as focused atomic beams [73] with tailored profiles [57]. This approach could be used to implement beam splitters and mixers (Fig.…”

The role of post-selection in generating vortex particles of arbitrary mass, spin, and energy

“…There are also ongoing discussions of possible experiments with other vortex particles, including elementary fermions heavier than electron, hadrons, ions and atoms, cold neutrons, nuclei, and even spin waves (magnons) [8, 34, 35, 41, 44-49, 51, 52, 56, 57]. Very recently, in 2021, the non-relativistic twisted atoms and molecules have been generated [58]. Clearly, a large class of quantum and classical waves can potentially carry phase vortices, which follows already from the similarities between the classical wave equations and the quantum ones.…”

Recent Progress in Improving the Performance of Infrared Photodetectors via Optical Field Manipulations

“…For the purpose of flexible manufacture and integration, metasurfaces, a two-dimensional form of metamaterials, have been extensively developed to manipulate electromagnetic waves and to investigate the interaction of light with matter. In contrast to traditional optical components relying on the phase accumulation effect of light propagation, the design flexibility of the subwavelength resonators and their electromagnetic response allows the metasurfaces to achieve customized control of multiple free degrees of the light field, such as amplitude [129], phase [130,131], polarization [124,132], wavelength [133], and angular momentum [134,135]. Many novel optical effects and devices applications have been realized, such as utilizing the mode resonance to manipulate the amplitude to realize perfect absorbers [136,137] and amplitude-based holography [138]; engineering chromatic dispersion to realize the broad-band chromatic metalens [139][140][141], spectroscopy [142,143] and full-color imaging [144]; designing the birefringent meta-atoms for polarization conversion [125,132] and vectorial polarization holograms [145,146], etc.…”