Abstract
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.
Highlights
Inspired by hydrodynamic vortices, the concept of optical vortices (OVs) was created by Coullet et al in 1989 [1]
We provide a comprehensive discussion on the optical manipulation of Optical vortices (OVs), including orbital angular momentum (OAM) superposition, OAM sorting, OAM multiplexing, OAM holography, and nonlinear metasurfaces for OAM generation and manipulation
The metasurface is based on the photonic momentum transformation (PMT) principle [77], which allows OVs with different topological charges to focus on the same image plane with different azimuthal coordinates
Summary
The concept of optical vortices (OVs) was created by Coullet et al in 1989 [1]. Benefiting from peculiar optical features and the extra degree of freedom for light manipulation, OVs have been widely investigated as promising resources and have been applied in many research fields, including quantum science [2], particle trapping [3], optical communications [4, 5], and high-resolution lithography [6,7,8]. Optical metasurfaces are planar nanostructured interfaces and have recently attracted tremendous interests due to their unprecedented capability in the manipulation of the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light at subwavelength scale [11,12,13,14,15].
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