Abstract
Full angular momentum states constitute a complete and higher state space of a photon, which are significant not only for fundamental study of light but also for practical applications utilizing cylindrical optics such as optical fibers. Here we propose and demonstrate a simple yet effective scheme of combining the spiral transformation with Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) metasurfaces for high-resolution sorting of full angular momentum states. The scheme is verified by successfully sorting full angular momentum states with 7 orbital angular momentum states and 2 spin angular momentum states via numerical simulations and experiments. We expect that our work paves the way for simple high-resolution sorting of full angular momentum states, which could be highly useful in both classical and quantum information systems.
Highlights
In both classical and quantum perspectives, the lightwave/photon has two kinds of angular momenta, including a spin angular momentum (SAM) and an orbital angular momentum (OAM)
A simple yet efficient scheme is based on the optical coordinate transformation with a pair of Pancharatnam-Berry optical elements (PBOEs) [13], which is capable of simultaneously sorting SAM and OAM states with near unit efficiency even at the single-photon level
PBOEs are a kind of optical elements for wavefront shaping based on the PB phase, which is a geometric phase imposed by polarization conversion in contrast to a propagation phase [14,15]
Summary
In both classical and quantum perspectives, the lightwave/photon has two kinds of angular momenta, including a spin angular momentum (SAM) and an orbital angular momentum (OAM). The association of light’s angular momentum states with its polarization and spatial structures is significant for the fundamental study, and has important applications in various fields, such as high-capacity optical communications [3,4,5,6,7] and high-dimensional quantum information systems [8,9,10,11,12]. The following works in demonstration of simultaneously SAM and OAM sorting based on the log-polar transformation with PBOEs unavoidably suffer from the same aforementioned problem [16,27,28]. PB dielectric metasurfaces based on this spiral transformation are proposed and demonstrated for potential high-resolution sorting of full angular momentum states
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