Orbital angular momentum of helical necklace beams in colloid-based nonlinear optical metamaterials (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

Colloidal metamaterials are a robust and flexible platform for engineering of optical nonlinearities and studies of light filamentation. To date, nonlinear propagation and modulation instability of Gaussian beams and optical vortices carrying orbital angular momentum were studied in such media. Here, we investigate the propagation of necklace beams and the conservation of the orbital angular momentum in colloidal media with saturable nonlinearity. We study various scenarios leading to generation of helical necklace beams or twisted beams, depending on the radius, power, and charge of the input vortex beam. Helical beams are build of two separate solitary beams with circular cross-sections that spiral around their center of mass as a result of the equilibrium between the attraction force of in-phase solitons and the centrifugal force associated with the rotational movement. A twisted beam is a single beam with an elliptical cross-section that rotates around it's own axis. We show that the orbital angular momentum is converted into the rotational motion at different rates for helical and twisted beams. While earlier studies reported that solitary beams are expelled form the initial vortex ring along straight trajectories tangent to the vortex ring, we show that depending on the charge and the power of the initial beam, these trajectories can diverge from the tangential direction and may be curvilinear. These results provide a detailed description of necklace beam dynamics in saturable nonlinear media and may be useful in studies of light filamentation in liquids and light propagation in highly scattering colloids and biological samples.