Flexible and high-efficiency generation of arbitrary vector vortex beams on hybrid-order Poincaré sphere

Abstract

We propose theoretically and verify experimentally a compact optical configuration to directly generate arbitrary vector vortex beams on a hybrid-order Poincare sphere with good flexibility and high efficiency based on a reflective phase-only liquid crystal spatial light modulator (LC-SLM). The conversion system, consisting of an LC-SLM and a quarter-wave plate, can be considered a flexible dielectric metasurface to simultaneously modulate inhomogeneous polarization and helical phase-front. This approach has some advantages, including a simple experimental setup, good flexibility, and high efficiency. Orthogonally polarized modes alignment and an explicit superposition existing in the conventional method are not necessary in the proposed method, which exhibits potential applications in many advanced domains.