Uniform intensity chiral optical field by multifocal synthesis.

Abstract

Chiral optical beams that carry orbital angular momentum (OAM) have a broad range of applications such as optical tweezers, chiral microstructure fabrication, and optical communications. However, some chiral optical beams have inhomogeneous intensity distribution that limits the application in these fields. In this Letter, two different types of chiral optical fields with uniform intensity and arbitrary length were proposed based on the amplitude encoding method and multifocal synthesis. The intensity distribution of the chiral optical fields is determined by the distance between the focal points that can greatly extend the modulation length of the chiral optical field. Moreover, since each focal point contains modulable amplitude and phase, an arbitrary interception of the optical field can be realized by selectively retaining a part of the focal points. By partitioning the chiral optical field and assigning different topological charges, the OAM space-division multiplexing and independent tunability of the topological charges can be realized. In addition, the composite multi-petal vortex array formed by combining two different chiral optical fields can greatly enhance the information capacity of the optical communications and may have potential applications in fields such as particle manipulation.